The EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) transparency monitoring

The report assesses how well eleven selected Member States in the CEE region publish data on Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) spending.

This pilot study was conducted in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. It finds that:

• Member States publish just under 60% of the recommended information.
• The published information is only about 60% user-friendly, allowing easier tracking and feedback mechanisms.

The RRF is set to transform the functioning of the European Union and its Member States. After the experience of the pandemic and the economic crisis it caused, it was decided that many reforms and investments were needed to make Europe more resilient to similar events. It is also an opportunity for faster economic development and improved public services. A record amount of money has been allocated for this.

However, the complex procedures governing how the Fund's money is to be used have overlooked the comprehensive responsibilities for transparency in its spending. This not only hinders the work of journalists and Civil Society Organisations in preventing corruption or money laundering, but also makes it difficult to assess the effectiveness of the implementation of reforms, investments and, ultimately, the Fund as a whole.

Some countries, however, have chosen to implement solutions that, although inconsistent across the EU, allow all interested parties to see detailed information on spending.

The purpose of the evaluation is to check whether Member States had decided to introduce and implement a framework for transparency in the spending of RRF funds. We are interested in two ways of spending public funds: through public procurement and on the basis of grants/calls for proposals.

The methodology consists of two main parts:

• What information is published – this section focuses on the content of the information and what exactly is being released to the public.
• How information is published – this section focuses on the format and accessibility of RRF spending information, such as whether the information is all published on a central portal and whether it is in open data format (e.g. csv., xml., xlsx.).

Desk research and data collection on pilot countries took place in December 2022 – February 2023 and was carried out by the following researchers: Stephan Anguelov (Bulgaria), Elena Calistru (Romania), Ieva Dunčikaitė and Edita Semionovaitė (Lithuania), Steven-Hristo Evestus (Estonia), Olafs Grigus (Latvia), Dominika Iršová (Slovakia), Krzysztof Izdebski (Poland), Sanja Pavić (Croatia), István Pósfai (Hungary), Jana Stehnová (Czechia), Diana Tăbleț (Romania), Nina Trcek (Slovenia).

Every effort has been made to verify the accuracy of the information including contacting relevant national authorities for feedback on the initial assessment as well as learning about their plans for introducing greater transparency in RRF funds spending. All countries except Hungary received either written or spoken feedback. However, some inconsistencies may be witnessed due to different practices in legislative and regulatory processes meaning different researchers may come to slightly different conclusions from the same data and feedback received from authorities.