In relation to the information published today in a digital medium under the title “Transparency fails to assess whether the government complied with the law during the year of the pandemic“The Council of Transparency and Good Governance states the following:
The evaluation of compliance with the Transparency Act during the year 2020 has not been suspended. On the contrary, it has been strengthened, including more obligated subjects and, in addition, its publicity has been enhanced, publishing the results of the evaluations immediately in the council website as each group completes its own.
The only thing that has been suspended, for one year, is the publication of the evaluations in the Activity Report, specifically in 2020. And it was done precisely to be able to anticipate the publication of the Report and, at the same time, to publish the evaluations on the web as they are carried out and thus give them greater value for the interested parties, since now they have them available immediately, without having to wait at the end of the year. In fact, the ones have already been completed Assessments of constitutional bodies and independent administrative authorities for the year 2020 and are available on the web and in the coming days will be published the corresponding one to the Transparency Portal of the General Administration of the State.
It must be taken into account that the evaluations are made on an expired year. The law requires that annual compliance be evaluated, so from the first moment in the Council it has been understood that to carry out the evaluations it should wait until the end of the year. As a result, the evaluations have always been carried out in the following year and, until now, they were published for the first time in the annual report of activities, which, in turn, had to delay their publication until all the evaluation processes were completed, so that it was never published before November or December of the following year. Thus, for example, the evaluation of the compliance of the year 2019 was made throughout the year 2020 and saw the light in the Memory 2019, which was published in December 2020.
This formula generated a double gap: on the one hand, the publication of the institution’s Activity Report was long delayed (until the end of the following year) and on the other, the publication of the evaluations in relation to the moment in which they were carried out, with the corresponding loss of value and interest, both for the subjects obliged and for the media, the interested parties and the general public.
Hence, it has been decided to change the regime of publication of the evaluations. With the new approach, which was already explained in detail the Evaluation Plan 2021 Published in the month of January, the aim is to reduce this gap to the minimum necessary. From this year 2021, the Activity Report will be published at the end of the first quarter of the following year and the evaluations will be published by groups as they are completed and, at the end of the year, a summary is prepared that is incorporated into the Report.
Logically to implement the new system, the Report of Activities of the year 2020, if the publication date is advanced, as it has been done, at the end of March 2021, cannot collect the evaluations corresponding to the year 2020 (which, let’s remember, are carried out throughout 2021), because then we would have to wait at the end of the year. Therefore, it has had to dispense with including them in the document of the Report of activities 2020.
However, this does not mean that the evaluations have been suspended. On the contrary, as indicated above, they have been significantly enhanced as can be seen in the Plan and indicated, they are being published immediately on the web. In this way, the results are made known much earlier than was usual in the past. Unlike what happened with the 2019 assessment, which was done during 2020 and published at the end of 2020 in the 2019 Activity Report, the 2020 assessment is being carried out during 2021 and is being published by groups of obligated subjects as it is being concluded. And, on the other hand, the 2020 Activity Report has been published at the end of the first quarter of 2021 instead of at the end of the following year as it had been done.
In both cases, a considerable gain has been achieved in the immediacy with which the results are presented, so we understand that we better fulfil our role of monitoring the degree of compliance with the LTAIBG and of being accountable for our activities.
We deeply regret that, once again, unchecked information is published and reality is altered for the sole apparent purpose of harming the institution.