ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with some important generic principles surrounding the fundamentals of transparency and accountability and analyzes some examples of how the UN system has been addressing both of these essential issues. It comprises four components: funding, accounting for dollars and results, oversight, and staff management. A recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report defines fiscal transparency as the clarity, reliability, frequency, timeliness, and relevance of public fiscal reporting and the openness to the public of the government's fiscal policy-making process. With regard to transparency of aid funding in a wider context, the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), not to be confused with the aforementioned International Transparency and Accountability Initiative (ITAI), was established only in 2008 and is administered by a secretariat within the UN Development Programmme (UNDP). According to ITAI, transparency can be defined as having two pairs of key characteristics: relevance and accessibility; and timeliness and accuracy.
