FRANCE PRESENTS RECOMMENDATIONS FOR IMPROVING ANTI-CORRUPTION LAW
The French Committee on the Constitution, Legislation and Governance has published an analytical report on the effectiveness of the implementation of the Law «On Transparency, the Fight against Corruption and the Modernization of Economic Life», which entered into force in July 2017.
In the report, the Committee examines the main issues regulated by the Law, noting the successes achieved and existing shortcomings and proposing recommendations for improving the existing legislation.
The report, for example, touches upon the issues of the functioning of the Anti-Corruption Agency of France. As the authors of the report note, the creation of the Anti-Corruption Agency, provided for by the Law, has become an important step in organizing work to prevent corruption in the country. Before the agency was established, there was no specialized body in France with a preventive function. During its existence, the agency has organized many consultations, published a significant number of methodological recommendations, and carried out a number of large-scale checks. At the same time, the assessment of the agency's performance showed that there are some problems. In particular, the audited organizations expressed dissatisfaction with the burdensomeness and duration of the agency's inspections, the shift in the focus of the inspectors towards finding violations, rather than assessing compliance with the requirements of the Law. At the same time, experts expressed doubts that the agency is successfully coping with the coordination powers entrusted to it in the field of corruption prevention. In its report, the Committee offers several recommendations for improving the functioning of the agency. First, it is necessary to shorten the list of agency powers. The agency's powers should be reoriented to coordinate anti-corruption policy in the country, as well as to publish and distribute information and methodological materials on the fight against corruption. Secondly, the authors of the report recommend the creation of an inter-ministerial anti-corruption committee chaired by the Prime Minister of France, which will carry out its activities through a technical committee headed by the director of the agency. This structure will include the heads of the central administrative services and departments, as well as the chairmen of independent administrative bodies.
Significant attention in the report is paid to the issues of preventing corruption in organizations. One of the important innovations of the Law was the establishment of the obligation of organizations to take measures to prevent corruption. The results show that since the adoption of the Law, about 70% of companies have implemented the appropriate set of measures. As noted in the report, the organizations that are subject to the requirements of the Law have generally taken all the envisaged measures. At the same time, experts point out that the requirements established by the Law are too formal in nature, securing a closed list of anti-corruption measures and establishing clear criteria for their assessment. On the one hand, such unambiguity simplifies the work of the Agency, on the other hand, it limits the capabilities of the department, not allowing to take into account the peculiarities of the evaluated organizations.
The report also touches upon issues of pre-trial regulation of cases, the status of whistleblowers about corruption and measures to protect them, as well as some other aspects of the implementation of the Law «On Transparency, the Fight against Corruption and the Modernization of Economic Life».