Conflict of Interest Team

Transparency for Iran considers the management of conflict of interest as one of the most fundamental issues in governance. Conflict of interest management is a fundamental infrastructure for corruption prevention and resolving inefficiency, which is relatively neglected in the country. Based on this, Transparency for Iran decided to establish a specialized team focusing on the issue of conflict of interest and its management strategies. The core of the team was formed in 2017 with a research project entitled “Identifying Cases of Conflict of Interest” in the Ministry of Energy. Subsequently, with the addition and recruitment of capable researchers, the team was extended, and the public sector three-dimensional complication projects were put on the agenda from the perspective of conflict of interest.

After conducting three projects focusing on conflict of interest and its management in the Ministry of Labor, Cooperation and Social Welfare, the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade, and the Radio and Television Organization, due to the theoretical gap and lack of existing literature in Persian on conflict of interest, writing a comprehensive book on conflict of interest was set on the team’s agenda. This book contains definitions, concepts, forms, and types of conflicts of interest, consequences, domestic and international experiences, and legal issues. Other activities of the conflict of interest team include the translation of OECD toolkit for Managing Conflict of Interest in the Public Sector, the Critique of the Conflict of Interest Management Bill, and giving directions in writing some rules, research, and dissertations. Since the overall goal of this team is to manage conflict of interest with the aim of increasing efficiency in governing bodies, for the future, conducting studies and operational projects with issues of identifying instances and diagnosing problems of the country’s agencies based on conflict of interest, providing operational solutions to manage them, and promoting, discussing and educating  this concept has been considered at different levels of government.