The publication on the website of the Presidency of the council of the incomes and assets of the members of the government has aroused great praise, and it is mandatory to join the applause for the determination of the Prime Minister in obtaining it. A specific praise should be added for the style with which the prime minister himself presents his own financial situation and that of his wife to the Italians: the clarity of formulation and care in the list of items of signed documents make it a valuable lesson in accountability.
What no observer seems to have noticed is that the obligation to publish, as also emerges from the header of some of the formats used by government members to report on their income and assets, would have existed in Italy since 1982, the year of approval of a law called at the time "patrimonial register of the elected" and which also concerns the members of the government, who would also be required for thirty years to this part to update their declaration annually and, within three months of "cessation from office", to report (articles 4 and 10 of Law .441/82) on "changes in the patrimonial situation" to the chamber to which they belong and, if not elected, to the Senate.
Ever since that distant era, the law ascribes the power of formal notice for non-compliance to the direct responsibility of the presidents of the two branches of Parliament and the care of the material execution of the publication of the acts to their presidential offices. The same rules of 1982 also apply to the top management of all public entities and bodies and financed by the local public hand "for more than 50% of the amount of management expenses shown in the budget", state-owned companies, etc. In this case, the responsibility for collecting data for publication depends on the type of body concerned and varies from the Presidency of the Council of Ministers to the Mayor. What may surprise at this point is that this legislation, given how little it has been applied, has not fallen under some "law-size" law to then be shown as a trophy of achieved bureaucratic simplification.
President Monti has therefore implemented the revolutionary principle that the laws in force are applied seriously and with a spirit of transparency and took the initiative to integrate what has already been foreseen for thirty years with the publication of all the documents on the governo.it website. He also added, in the declaration, the balance of his current accounts and those of his wife, a fact which, also from a psychological point of view, is not insignificant in terms of the intrusion of strangers' eyes into one's personal life (something more personal than a current account, until yesterday?) and it should be noted that only a few members of the government integrated their declaration with this point, not to mention the absent declarations of the wives and husbands of the members of the government, required by law unless they are not consenting.
The disarming clarity of the statement by Prime Minister Monti it lays bare a series of issues of great moment and recalls in Italy a tradition of integrity as an obvious rule of life of which traces had been completely lost and which a part of the country feels an enormous need for.
The whole question shows that transparency is primarily the other side of the coin of respect for the citizen. Who governs is not legibus solutus but someone who has the responsibility and must give an account of what he does and will do, dragging as much of the country as possible towards virtuous behaviour. Whoever governs does not escape knowledge from the outside, but rather opens every door because, having nothing to hide, he likes everything to be known and verifiable. The behavior adopted marks a cultural break with the past and we must hope that it produces a genetic transformation.
What still emerges is that transparency on the web is for the moment the true face of contemporary democracy and that the web must systematically be considered the main vehicle for information and dialogue with citizens. Much remains to be done to culturally and technically equip public administrations in this senseeven the most prestigious ones.
The Premier then applied the principle that to put things in order you have to start with who's in charge and not blame the sergeant of the day. The rules on the disclosure of income and assets of the top management of public bodies and companies have existed for thirty years but transparency must be taken care of starting from the top in a cascade. The rules in this regard (and there are others besides those of 1982) have so far been applied inattentively not because new provisions are needed but because so far what Erving Goffman has called the "operating consensus" within many Italian public institutions , even at very high levels and in the same administrative courts, was in the sense of limiting the curiosities from the outside to the bare minimum. It is to be hoped that rigor will lead the way.
The story shows that even outdated laws - thirty years would be a long time, according to the "law size" fashion - can be used to make precious things and there is no need for new rules when a circular from the President of the Council of Ministers is sufficient : we could take note of it for the next simplification measures, given that since 1997 annual waves of them have been prescribed and the result is a system that is now shaky and unknown to most, including officials in charge, at any territorial level of competence.
But the last remark concerns the intolerable anachronism that afflicts our elected chambers. The parliamentarians who have authorized the publication on the web of their statements, made with the obligation of the formula "on my honor I affirm that the statement is true", are just a third of the total. The others take advantage of the fact that the 1982 law indicates the publication of the data in a "special bulletin" and, in order to remove the content from public knowledge with contemporary methods, they demand that the publication on the websites of the Chamber and the Senate take place only following individual authorisation, which is not issued. In reality, for some time now the bureaus of the two chambers should have established that the website is the place of publication of all information on Parliament and that what the legislator intended in 1982 to be disseminated on paper must be understood today in digital format and available Network. With regard to the registry office, the law ascribes the supervisory power and direct warning to the presidents of the two houses of Parliament, that it is not clear how they can admit further prevarications and mystifications.
It is to be hoped that the media, once the gleaning between motorcycles, motorboats and boats has died down, will deal with keep in view the lists of MPs who have refused consent to the publication of their data and disseminate them periodically, letting voters know and reminding them of the attitude of their elected officials regarding personal transparency. It could be just the point from which to start again.
