Recovery Board and State Department officials meet with the FONAC staff in Tegucigalpa.Since its inception in February 2009, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (the Board) has met with delegations from many foreign countries, including Brazil, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and the European Union, to provide insight to the Board’s transparency and accountability missions. In May 2013, Board staff, for the first time, was invited to visit a foreign county to provide expertise on transparency and on the building of a transparency website.
The U.S. State Department asked the Board to assist in the development of a transparency project that the State Department had initiated in Honduras. With funding by the State Department, the Board sent two senior staff members to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to meet with the Comité Tecnico de Fedeicomiso (CTF). The CTF is a commission overseeing distribution of funds collected through a security tax that was passed in early 2011 to help prevent and ultimately stop the pervasive violence in the country. Providing transparency on the management of those funds is a priority for the CTF.
Nancy DiPaolo, the Board’s Chief of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs, and Alice Siempelkamp, Assistant Director of Recovery.gov, visited Honduras and shared their expertise and lessons learned about transparency and about the creation of Recovery.gov. They also offered detailed suggestions on how the CTF could best implement a transparency website tailored to its objectives.
From left: Juan F. Ferrera, Executive Secretary, Fideicomiso; Alice Siempelkamp, Recovery.gov; Edward Kadunc, Consultant to the U.S. State Dept.; Nancy DiPaolo, Recovery Board; Arturo Corrales, Security Minister of Honduras; Daniel Friedman, U.S. State Dept.
The CTF transparency website was launched on May 24. Ms. DiPaolo and Ms. Siempelkamp will continue to consult with the CTF as the website is expanded and data is collected.
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