Financial Crime World

Tunisia’s Progress in Fighting Corruption: Strengths and Weaknesses

The report on Tunisia’s performance in the fight against corruption highlights both positive developments and areas that require improvement. Here are some key points:

Strengths

  • Civil Society Oversight: Tunisia has a strong civil society oversight capacity, with a risk score of 31, making it the best performer among the 4 domains constituting the TRACE Bribery Risk Matrix.
  • Anti-Corruption Policy: Tunisia has a robust anti-corruption policy framework, combining rigour and incentives, which is becoming increasingly stronger.
  • Business Climate: The business climate in Tunisia is improving, with a significant reduction in corruption as a major constraint on activity, from 70% to 61%.

Weaknesses

  • Institutional Corruption: Institutional corruption remains a problem, with 70% of business leaders considering it a major constraint on their activity.
  • Transparency and Openness: Tunisia’s performance in terms of government openness and transparency, and citizens’ right to information is modest compared to the rest of the world.
  • E-Government Development Index: While Tunisia’s score is above the world average (0.65 against 0.61), it still lags behind in e-government development.

Recommendations

To build on the progress made and address the weaknesses, several recommendations are proposed:

  1. Electronic Management of Procurement Cycle: Move to electronic management of the full procurement cycle.
  2. Dematerialization of Administrative Procedures: Ensure total digitization of all administrative procedures and dematerialization of all procedures using citizens’ unique identifiers and QR codes.
  3. Strengthening Financial Reporting Oversight: Strengthen financial reporting oversight mechanisms for SOEs through updating public sector budget and accounting information on open platforms.
  4. Governance of Regulatory Institutions: Adopt the negative list of authorizations and develop governance of regulatory institutions and licensing committees to facilitate market access.
  5. Awareness and Training in Ethics: Raise awareness and provide training in ethics and good anti-corruption practices.
  6. Strict Enforcement of Laws: Ensure strict enforcement of laws and regulations, and strengthen control systems.

Conclusion

Overall, while Tunisia has made progress in fighting corruption, there is still a need for perseverance and commitment to irreversible reforms to improve the business climate and address institutional corruption.