Executive Summary
Anti-Corruption Agencies (ACA) can be powerful tools in combatting corruption. When they are independent of the Government and empowered to investigate corruption allegations, they have the potential to hold even the most powerful to account. As such, The United Nations Convention Against Corruption enjoins participant countries to establish independent bodies tasked exclusively with enforcing national anticorruption efforts.
Though the 2012 Jakarta Principles broadly delineate the principles by which ACAs must abide, there is currently no comprehensive standard tool that can be internationally applied to measure their efficiency. To exploit this area of opportunity Transparency International (TI) has recently launched the ACA Strengthening (ACA) Initiative.
The ACA SI assessment tool enquires into seven dimensions: 1) ACA’s Legal Independence and Status 2) ACA’s Financial and Human Resources 3) ACA’s Detection and Investigation Function 4) ACA’s Prevention, Education and Outreach Functions 5) ACA’s Cooperation with other Organizations 6) ACA’s Accountability and Oversight 7) Public Perceptions of the ACA’s performance.
Each dimension is composed of relevant and measurable indicators scored high medium or low which are assigned the numerical values of 2, 1 and 0 respectively used to score that dimension. There are 50 indicators in total. Cumulatively they are used to score the overall performance of the ACA
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