An ever greater awareness of the need for public bodies to maintain standards of efficiency and correctness in respect of members of the public, society at large and towards other institutions, has  created a requirement (in many national and international contexts) to set up technically qualified organisations specialising in the prevention of and the fight against corruption and other forms of illicit behaviour occurring within the public administration.

The establishment of the Anti-corruption and Transparency Service in Italy was intended to allow the development of a systematic strategy for the prevention of these different types of illicit behaviour.

This strategy finds concrete application in three ways:

• a regular review of the updating and relevance of legal instruments and administrative practices.
• identification of critical areas of the regulatory system.
• checking the degree of vulnerability of the public administration to corruption and to the criminal behaviour associated with it.