On cooperation between the authorities, the public and the IT sector: in the framework of the participation of teachers of the Department of Digital Economics and Business Analytics in the Digital Anti-Corruption Conference

On December 7, 2021, Iryna Shevchuk, Bohdan Deputat, Oksana Vaskiv and Anna Starukh, lecturers at the Department of Digital Economics and Business Analytics, Faculty of Finance and Business Management, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, took part in the Digital Anti-Corruption Conference with financial support from the European Union and Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation, German Marshall Fund project USA.

The aim of the conference is to help civil society fighting corruption in Central and Eastern Europe (and in Ukraine in particular) to expand its professional network with representatives of the IT sector for joint projects.

The main task of such an event is to enable participants to share approaches to working at the intersection of transparency, accountability, integrity and access to information on the one hand and the development of digital tools on the other; learn and try available digital anti-corruption tools, and get feedback from colleagues.

Conference organizers:

• NGO “Anti-Corruption Headquarters” (Kyiv, Ukraine)
• Transparency International Estonia (Tallinn, Estonia)

Speakers of the event (John Vrusi, Research Coordinator at the Transparency International Secretariat in Berlin; Mihai Fazekas, Research Director of the Institute for Government Transparency, Budapest; Anton Poretskov, Managing Partner and Director of RBC Group Ukraine; Oleksiy Sobolev, Executive Director) view of the public sector, the private sector, NGOs and academia as digital solutions in the fight against corruption in different legal and cultural contexts. Emphasis was placed on how anti-corruption efforts and actions have changed in the digital world. They have demonstrated by concrete examples that digital tools are quite effective in the fight against corruption. At the same time, the conference participants drew attention to the advantages and problems of using digital tools in the fight against corruption and the role of actors in this process.

In addition, there was a demonstration of existing innovative solutions to combat corruption, including such:

• Rahapada – a platform that visualizes all data on Estonian political funding since 2013;
• Banipartide – a platform that collects data on political funding in Romania from 2006 to 2021;
• Manovalstybe.info – a tool dedicated to highlighting possible conflicts of interest and misuse of public funds in Lithuania;
• Word & Action is a platform that tracks the political promises of Estonian politicians, using open sources and press releases, analyzing them according to their own rating system and providing updates on issues that can be edited or commented on by other members of the community, a similar feature to Wikipedia;
• STIRNA.info is a platform that demonstrates the connections of Lithuanian politicians with national and regional media

Experience gained during the discussion on how European countries are reforming to become open, efficient and built on the principles of integrity and transparency through the use of online programs and automation of services -sector as potential stakeholders of the educational program “Information Technology in Business”, as well as for teaching a number of disciplines.