The collaboration regards the ongoing renovation process of the Italian public administration, to limit public costs, simplify the legislative framework and offer more efficient and timely services. Hence the increasingly massive spreading of information technologies to foster this changes.
Scientific research may contribute to the search, testing and submitting new solutions to accelerate this process.
These inputs lead to the collaboration between the Italian National Anticorruption Authority and the University of Trento, and more specifically with the Department of Information Engineering and Sciences and the Faculty of Law.
A memorandum of understanding was signed a few days ago, to start a series of research projects, at European and Italian level, in the field of public contracts, aimed at renovating and innovating the public procurement procedures, making them more transparent at the same time.
The reasons why the Italian National Anticorruption Authority chose Trento are two elements which have earned the University of Trento national recognition and which have been active since 2007 on a joint research approach in the field of public procurement:
1) The Observatory of European and Italian Law on Public Procurement, coordinate by Professor Gian Antonio Benacchio, held at the Faculty of Law. It is a participative laboratory involving a wide network of academics, magistrates and experts involved in research activity - at public and private level - regarding initiatives in the field of comparative legal studies, the modernisation of the public procurement bargaining procedures and the evaluation of the impact of the rules and regulations.
2) The various research groups working at the Department of Information Engineering and Sciences, who have excelled in the phases of data integration, extraction and automatized processing.
The agreement was signed by the President of the Italian National Anticorruption Authority, Raffaele Cantone, and Giuseppe Nesi and Gian Pietro Picco, respectively Directors of the Faculty of Law and of the Department of Information Engineering and Sciences. It outlines the development of highly technological tools for archiving and monitoring data regarding the awarding and implementation of public procurement contracts in Italy. Such tools will be strategic to evaluation the ratio between the European rules application and the level of economic efficiency of the national and regional systems in the field of public procurement. Professor Nicoletta Parisi, Member of the Board of Directors of ANAC and Professor Gian Antonio Benacchio (University of Trento) are the coordinators of the initiatives established by the memorandum.