Thirty-eight tip-offs about corruption by public officials were received at a new government anti-corruption portal since its presentation on December 21, 2007, a media statement by the Council of Ministers said.

All of the tip-offs have been distributed among the inspectorates of the respective institutions and among the regional municipal councils so investigations could be performed. According to the Administrative Procedure Code, the term for this was 2 months. If the case was more complex, this term could be prolonged.

So far there were no tip-offs against higher state officials, the media statement said.

Most of the tip-offs were regarding bribes, requested by medical workers and by customs and police officials. There were complaints about illegal activities during a competition over renting municipal property, about conflicts of interests, about bad attitude towards clients, and so on.

Upon registering a tip-off on the website of the anti-corruption committee, the person filing the complaint would receive a unique code with which they could keep an eye on any actions taken in the case. There was no possibility whatsoever to delete a submitted tip-off which would prevent all attempts to cover perpetrators.

Currently 70 employees were engaged in processing the tip-offs. All of them followed a special course and received an electronic signature, the media statement said.

For the time being the system would include only tip-offs received via the Internet. Scanning and entering of tip-offs that were arrived on paper would be added. The Internet addresses of all ministries and state administration institutions would be unified in order to enable the reception of tip-offs at one single place, namely the new website. The aim was to improve control of the terms and quality of the investigations performed, as well as the coordination between separate institutions.

At the time of writing, the website was available in Bulgarian only.