OEG | nagnoi

Puerto Rico Office of

Government Ethics- Government

CASE STUDY

Meet Our Customer

The Puerto Rico Office of Government Ethics (OGE) promotes and preserves the integrity of public officials of government institutions. OGE has the mission of educating over 200,000 public employees in ethics and integrity, as well as the responsibility of auditing, investigating, and reporting any violation of the Code of Ethics as established by law. Thus, strengthening and giving continuity to the development process to assure excellence in public service, to which all citizens aspire.

CUSTOMER

SERVICES PROVIDED

Challenge

To renew and reassert the preventive and overseeing duties of the OGE, the Ethics Act of 2012 was established. This Act consisted in making public (online) financial reports for specific government positions for the proper evaluation of the financial status of public officials. Eligible positions are: the Governor of Puerto Rico, all 78 mayors, heads of government agencies and comptrollers, procurement officers, among others. The main purpose was to ensure transparency in government through financial disclosure, enabling citizens to have a reliable profiles of personnel who aspire to hold office in public service.

The challenge came as the Ethics Act of 2012 came into effect. The media and citizens were constantly claiming the information to be publish as soon as possible. Therefore, the OGE had an urgency of having public servants’ financial reports online, making the solution’s development time a big challenge.

Solution

OGE contracted Nagnoi to develop, in record time, a web application that can upload and report online, accurately and reliably, the financial data submitted by public servants.The solution consisted in publishing on-line financial summaries of public officials of the Government of Puerto Rico. With the objective of providing transparency while safeguarding the interest of the public servants and officials, this application was designed and developed complying with Article 5.8 (a) Law 1-2012 of the Office of Government Ethics.

The OGE has received accolades and great feedback from public officers, the media and private citizens that access the application on a daily basis.

Cloud Application Development

Puerto Rico Office of Government Ethics

Benefits

The solution’s benefits received by Puerto Rico Office of Govern-ment Ethics were:

Financial records are available online to citizens in and outside of Puerto Rico.
Every citizen in the island (close to 3.7 million) can now easily access all financial reports of public officials through this web application. There are currently 29,218 financial reports loaded into the system for more than 10,000 public officials from the Government of Puerto Rico.
During the first 8 months (since the application went live) 2,627 public officials (unique), or 30% of all eligible public servants, were searched through the portal, allowing the OGE to comply with the law effectively.
Audit and investigation processes carried out by the OGE were optimized, while services were streamlined to meet citizen expectations in the efforts of fighting corruption.
Thanks to this solution the OGE complied with the law in record time by deploying the solution to production in just 8 weeks.
Since the application was built to run in the cloud, the OGE saved more than $35,000 in on-premise infrastructure plus an additional $50,000 in services from internal and external resources. This cost plus an additional $40,000 in recurrent maintenance was avoided since the solution is currently running in the cloud.
Since it is a cloud based solution, there was no need to invest in additional infrastructure or in maintenance of equipment.
The solution has been running with a 100% uptime, and zero maintenance.
Training for internal resources was not required.
Due to the application robustness and ease of use, the OGE has not received a single complain or dispute from citizens or government officials regarding the integrity of the data, system failures or missing financial reports.

Thanks to this solution the OGE continues establishing the highest standards of integrity within public service to safeguard trust in Puerto Rico’s government institutions and ensure transparency in the discharge of official duties.