2008 Assessment

This peer-reviewed country report includes:

Integrity Indicators Scorecard: Scores, scoring criteria, commentary, references, and peer review perspectives for more than 300 Integrity Indicators.

Reporter's Notebook: An on-the-ground look at corruption and integrity from a leading local journalist.

Corruption Timeline: Ten years of political context to today's corruption and integrity issues.

Country Facts: Statistical context for each country.

While the overall anti-corruption architecture for Bulgaria appears strong, the country faces its greatest challenges in the fields of political financing and whistle blowing. Bulgarian political financing is plagued with "legal vagueness" that have led to scandals such as the June 2008 case of European Union funding being misappropriated to the Bulgarian Socialist Party and the incumbent president's reelection campaign. A national Ombudsman and smaller institutional mechanisms exist for addressing citizen and civil servant corruption concerns, but the lack of a whistle-blowing culture, or protection measures to bolster that culture, make these agencies largely ineffective. The newly created State Agency for National Security has a mandate to conduct independent investigations into organized crime, but the political nature of its recent activity has "provoked controversy and serious doubts about its effectiveness."