Riigikontroll

50% of aid has been granted primarily for the development of information systems aimed at the state, although the role of the private businesses and the citizens in the development of information society has also been touched upon in the Information Society Development Plan. This means that state agencies have received as much aid as the other two target groups put together. The state is also favoured in the distribution of aid within the scope of implementation schemes: the actual target group of the open application call (local authorities, non-profit associations), for example, only received 15% of the money distributed on the basis of the scheme.

The feedback given by the Ministry about the impact of the aid changes year on year, and is sometimes the most suitable for the Ministry itself. The expected levels of many indicators that measure the results achieved with the use of the aid have been changed with several of them now more modest than initially determined. This applies mostly to the indicators that were determined in the first years of the programme period and the new indicators added in recent years have generally not been changed. As the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications has been one of the quickest to use the EU funds due to its attempts to reduce the impact of recession on the IT sector, then such volatility may have been caused by rushing into things without thinking them through.

Supervision of projects is a formality: the achievement of substantive goals is not always evaluated. There is a thorough inspection of whether the expenditure for which the aid is paid out is actually the expenditure indicated in the project, but the achievement of the project’s goals is almost not evaluated at all. This is the result of vague evaluation criteria, which usually don’t even expect the projects to have a specifically measurable impact. The attention paid to the sustainability of the created information systems is also insufficient, i.e. there is no evaluation of the administration and maintenance costs of the information system or the extent to which further development is required.