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Reasons Why Gori District’s Local Budget is not transparent.

April 29, 2008

Saba Tsitsikashvili, Gori

The Human Rights Centre draws its attention to the faults of the efficient work of the local Gori self-government. Although the Supervision Institution of Self-governments and the Regional Governor promised absolute transparency in the district budget, lack of transparency still plagues the local government.

The main problem lays in the overall low activity of civil society, which only serves to encourage the local authority to conduct their activities in secret. Consequently, the principle of publicity is being breached, and there is an impression that nobody understands where, why, for what, for whom and how the local budget is spent.

Although the law on local budget states that a public institution should promote the publicity of introduction, confirmation and implementation of draft-projects of the budget, nothing is being done in reality.

Another point to be underlined is the high number of non-qualified personnel working in state bodies. People employed in the local authority think that cooperation with journalists and NGOs is dangerous. The attitude is that if they cooperate with such people, high ranking officials would rebuke them for such actions and that they also might be fired from their positions. For example, when we applied to the “Person Responsible for Issuing the Public Information”, the employees of the Municipality Board’s chancellery replied to us that our letter of request was incorrect. Later we learned that our mistake was the name of addressee and we had to apply to the head of the Municipality Board and not to the person responsible for issuing public information. 

The reply of the Press Service Department of the Municipality Board was also interesting. We wrote to the Municipality Board in February of 2008 and requested public information on their reply to Tea Dzimistarashvili, a Gori District Court judge who had requested that they estimate the personality of the legal heir of the property of the district council liquidated in 2006. Although the Gori Municipality Board sent us a copy of the Chairperson’s reply to Tea Dzimistarashvili, the Municipality Board wrote that they added a comment they were sending a Suit of the “Iberia Ltd”, which is being discussed in court. We could not understand what the connection between the letter of the Chairperson of the Municipality Board and the suit of the “Iberia Ltd” was. 

We think that the norms estimated by the Tax Law must be worked out. Officials use this law according to their own wishes. We encountered many facts when the municipality board requested that we provide receipts to prove that we have paid for copies of the official documents they sent to us. In most cases the money is less than 10 tetri. The Tax Law states: “When a public institution sends documents by ordinary mail and not by fast mail, the addressee need not pay tax.”

Similar methods have become characteristic for local public officials to demand reimbursement for issued public information. If we compare the replies sent by the people responsible for issuing public information at various Governmental Bodies from 2004 through 2008, all letters contain equal content and there has been no progress observed in the skills of officials in writing official replies.


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