CONSIDERATIONS AND PROPOSALS ON THE PUBLICSECTOR ETHICS AND GOOD GOVERNANCE - The Strategic Role of Control From the Perspective of Accountability

The subject of this paper is the relationship that exists between public-sector ethics and good governance: the strategic role of control from the perspective of accountability. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationships that exist between the system of control in public administration management and the tools used, highlighting the need that even under a profile of functionality of control, a cohesion is attained between the tools and the objectives of the control, and between management philosophy and monitoring methods of the results. If one examines the varied range of control foreseen by the Italian Court System, it can be held that the relationship with ethics in general cannot exclude several categories of control, but rather gather fundamental logic and value, and perhaps group them based on the objectives pursued. In reality, all the attempts to define the concept of public-sector ethics continually bring out two profiles and two types of values: the ethics of legality and impartiality on the one hand, and the ethics of the results and economy, on the other. Ethics in the public sector does not allow that the choices and the behaviour of public administrations be inappropriately influenced by special interests; at the same time, though, public-sector ethics cannot not be opposed to waste, inactivity and to that sum of phenomena that are labelled as maladministration. At the same time, particularity from the objective point of view undertaken in relation to the control, public-sector ethics cannot disregard an evaluation of efficiency and effectiveness, so that the necessary respect of the rules cannot turn into an opportunity and pretext for unjustifiable delays and defaults. Strategic logic helps to define the objectives and priorities in the framework of the changes requested by the external socio-economic environment in order to verify the feasibility based on the resources available and those acquirable, accompanied in a coherent manner by the choice of actions and activities necessary to reach the goals proposed.