A tracked complaint matters only if someone is held accountable

Prime Minister Edi Rama on Sunday unveiled “Pasqyrë Albania,” a platform meant to bring every state institution, from ministries to municipalities, into a single window. In their personal e-Albania space, citizens will see every application, service and complaint in real time, and when a legal deadline passes without a reply they will receive a text message with a link to file a complaint that is officially registered. Rama called requests getting lost in the bureaucracy the “Achilles' heel” of the relationship between citizens and the state. The diagnosis is right.

The idea has real value. The “Shih” (See) pillar promises to show where public money is invested in each municipality, including suspended or delayed projects, while “Kupto” (Understand) publishes the decisions and draft decisions of municipal councils. If the data is complete and up to date, journalists, the opposition and citizens themselves will have one more tool to compare promises with reality. That is transparency that can be measured.

But tracking is not yet accountability. A text message telling you an institution is late records the problem; it does not solve it. The presentation did not say what happens to the official or the office that misses a deadline: whether there are consequences, who decides them and whether they are made public. Without that link, the platform risks becoming an elegant archive of complaints. The timing, too, on the same day Rama placed a stone table carved with the word “Dialog” outside the Prime Minister's Office and protesters marched for the 20th day, makes it unavoidable to ask whether this is reform or messaging.

The criticism applies to the government's opponents as well. A tool that shows where investments and requests get stuck can be used precisely to hold the government to account; dismissing it without trying it would be as much of a mistake as declaring it a success before it works. The government, for its part, should be careful with its promise of artificial intelligence, to be added gradually: an assistant that summarizes council decisions is no substitute for their full text.

Our proposal: from the first month, the platform should publish every quarter, for each institution, how many requests it received, how many were answered within the deadline and how many were not, in an open, downloadable format. The Ombudsman should have full access to this data, and Parliament should hear every year from the institutions with the worst delays. Only then will the mirror also show the face of whoever failed to reply.