Standard used to assess transparency and accountability of state-owned enterprises were selected on the basis of an analysis of relevant legislation and international standards. Hence, dominant share of selected standards are legally binding for all state-owned enterprises, while a small share of them are standards considered to represent good practice.
As regards legal obligations, selected standards include those stipulated under the Law on Public Enterprises, the Law on Free Access to Public Information and the Law on Whistleblower Protection.
In defining standards, due consideration was made of laws that regulate specific business activities performed by certain public enterprises (Energy Law, Law on Public Utility Services, Law on Postal Services, Law on Water Economy, etc.), and the Law on Securities. Another binding legal act for state-owned enterprises concerns the Open Government Partnership’s Action Plan 2018–2020. As regards good practices, standards were drawn from those recommended by OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) in the Guidelines on Corporate Governance of State-Owned Enterprises. According to these guidelines, state-owned enterprises should demonstrate high standards on transparency and accountability.
These are some of the key findings
- The 30 biggest enterprises founded by the government and local self-government units publish only 48% of information and documents they are obliged to share on their official websites. The research conducted in June 2022 shows a minor increase (7%) compared to the situation observed in 2020 when state-owned enterprises demonstrated compliance of 41% in respect to publication of relevant information and documents.
- In the last two years, greater progress in transparency is noted among enterprises founded by the government compared to those founded by local self-government units. Namely, SOEs founded by the government have improved their transparency from 39% in 2020 to 51% in 2022, while municipal public enterprises demonstrated an improvement from 43% in 2020 to 46% in 2022.
- However, the progress achieved by enterprises founded by the government falls short of expectations having in mind that, at the beginning of 2021, the Government issued an announcement that financial reports of SOEs will not be reconsidered by its commission for economic system if the concerned enterprise has not published on its website all 22 groups of documents and information mandated by the Law on Free Access to Public Information and the Transparency Strategy of the Government of the Republic of North Macedonia.
You can read the research in Macedonian and English language
For more information, please contact the Center for Civil Communications at (02) 3213-513 or at center@ccc.org.mk.