The workshop included an exercise of a country’s self-assessment against transparency standards, which made me reflect on the compliance of our existing practices with the IMF Fiscal Transparency Code. Together with a colleague from the Ministry of Development of Turkey we tried to assess how fiscal practices in Turkey perform against the criteria of the Code. We had to go over the fiscal legislation, statistics and reports compiled by national fiscal institutions, along with the roles and functions of these institutions. We inferred that Turkey has been performing very well in these terms and, for even better compliance with international standards on transparency, needs to commit to take structural steps in line with an action plan.

The Turkish fiscal policy has phased out several reforms since 2001. Recently, these reforms have speeded up, and designing, interpreting and commenting on the reforms constitute a great portion of our daily work. With the insight from the workshop, I am now able to interpret legislation from a different perspective and propose new actions in the light of the standards set out in the Code. Namely, the Turkish Treasury, in particular our department, was recently involved in drafting two distinct revisions to our Public Financial Management and Public Private Partnership laws. The standards for more transparent practices discussed at the IMF/CEF workshop gave me invaluable insight for drafting the revisions. Moreover, I believe that Turkey will take further steps to improve its transparency practices in the light of international standards, particularly the IMF Fiscal Transparency Code.

Kifaye Didem Bayar
Treasury Expert
Undersecretariat of Treasury
Turkey