Strenghtening Institutional Capacity Building for Legal Drafting & Regulatory Management IDF Grant The grant will be implemented by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), in close coordination with the Parliaments Legislative Council and the Ministry of Public Finance.   A brief description of the components of the grant is presented below.  1.  Introducing and developing an effective framework for legal drafting.  This would consist of the analysis of the gaps and deficiencies in the current framework for legal drafting, including legislative planning, policy deliberations and coordination, and public consultation issues.  Once this is completed, work under this component would identify measures designed to improve and maintain law drafting standards.  This would include the provision of technical assistance and training to units in the executive branch responsible for law drafting, as well as technical assistance and training aimed at enhancing the capacity of the Legislative Council to review and analyze draft laws. 2.  Introducing and developing regulatory impact assessments (RIAs).  This component would include the analysis of the existing systems of assessment and evaluation of draft laws.  This would define the role of line ministries, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Public Finance and other government agencies in conducting, inter alia, cost benefit analysis and budgetary impact assessments.  Once this groundwork is completed, models and procedures for regulatory impact assessments (RIAs) would be developed.  This would include the identification of agencies/bodies to be responsible for RIAs both within and outside of government, including Parliament.  Specific attention would be given to training requirements and recommendations on the proposed allocations of financial and personnel resources for undertaking these RIAs.  Attention would also be given to the identification of the analytical methods and tools to be used or developed for these agencies, as well as to designing procedures to be followed in RIA and for integrating RIA into the policy development process.  Finally, attention would be given to designing procedures for ensuring compliance with a requirement to carry out RIAs. The work under this component would culminate in workshops to discuss the proposed RIA strategy.  The participants in these workshops would include policy makers, governmental officials, parliamentarians, and representatives of civil society (e.g., trade unions, legal and business communities).  Also, there would be training for a selected group of civil servants from the relevant Ministries and the Parliaments Legislative Council. 3.  Introducing and developing performance-monitoring procedures for new legislation.  At present, new legislation is approved and implemented with little concern for post-implementation evaluation.  While some laws include an implementation section determining the transition arrangements associated with a given regulation, there is no mandated requirement on the implementers of a law to subsequently review their impact once enacted.  This results in a failure to demonstrate value for public money.  This assessment would aim at defining key steps to introduce performance monitoring procedures, with the objective of informing the government and implementing ministry on the costs and benefits of the legislation, so that improvements can be made to the policy making process. Since the  introduction of policy evaluation procedures would require a significant generation of skills not currently sufficiently available among Romanian government officials, this component would also includ e technical assistance and training to be provided to staff in the Ministry of Justice and other line ministries responsible for monitoring the implementation of new legislation. 4.  Introducing and developing transparency (anti-corruption) procedures in the law-making process.  This would consist of training programs (seminars, workshops) aimed at designing legislation to address corruption.  Specific tools to be presented include Â“vulnerability assessmentsÂ” (i.e., the assessment of the Â“inherent risksÂ” of corruption in the proposed legislation and the adequacy of the proposed safeguards).  It would also include assistance in the development of an ethical code of behavior for policy makers and legislators. 5.  Strengthening budget management.   This would consist of a review of the preparation, execution and evaluation of the budget for the judicial system.  The system is, at present, highly centralized in the Ministry of Justice.  The review would aim at identifying possible inefficiencies of the system and at providing recommendations to overcome these inefficiencies.  Problems to explore include inefficiency in the allocation of resources between courts, the high transaction costs produced by excessive controls over expenditure reallocation within a court, and the use of non-transparent off-budgetary funds to supplement the judicial budget.  It is believed that all of these features may be spurred by the high degree of control by the Ministry of Justice, which might be reducing judicial independence and integrity.  In case this is confirmed in the review, the recommendations would need to identify actions that would make the budget process for the judicial sector less centralized and more flexible.  A key challenge would be how to improve the accountability of courts in terms of use of budgetary funds, especially given the weak administrative capacity at the court level.  One mechanism of accountability may be to use available data on judges' and court performance to inform the process of budget allocation.