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An article published by PlayTheGame.org, Soren Bang reports that Play the Game’s new Sports Governance Observer ranks FINA close to the bottom rung of scores when it comes to governance.
Among the lowest scoring are federations like the International Boxing Association (AIBA), the International Swimming Federation (FINA), the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB), the International Canoe Federation (ICF) and the International Biathlon Union – all with an average score against the six indicators of around or just below 2.
Led by FIFA, international sports federations have been regular subjects in newspaper reports on corruption, abuse of power and lack of transparency and democracy. But how well are the international federations actually doing – individually and as a whole – if they are evaluated on a number of well-established indicators of good governance in organisations?
This is one of the key questions behind a new study focussing on the international federations representing 35 Olympic sports. The study is based on the Sports Governance Observer – a governance measurement tool recently developed by Play the Game and the University of Leuven in co-operation with a number of partners.
A typical problem is that very few federations have established independent audit and ethics committees with sufficient authority and power to execute efficient financial controls, conduct risk management and to monitor the application of an ethics code if such is present at all.
The study shows that eight federations do not have an internal audit committee and 12 fail to have an ethics committee, scoring only 1 in a scale of 1 to 5. Moreover, the majority of the remaining federations are not doing much better.
Finally, and very importantly, the Sports Governance Observer and its indicators do not say anything about how corrupt or mismanaged an organisation is. In principle, a very low scoring organisation could be clean-cut, while a high scoring organisation may be sinking in a swamp of corruption.
FINA has been under scrutiny lately by the American and World Coaches Association who have been asking for internal audits and overall changes in how FINA governs the aquatic sports.
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