The project overall objective is to support the Ministry of Agriculture and Regional Development and Environment in improving its financial capability and governance to implement agriculture and rural development policy.

- To strengthen the institutional capacity of the Agency for Intervention and Payment in Agriculture (AIPA) to administer ARD support measures in line with European Union norms and standards. The Twinning supports the AIPA to administrate the new support measures on advanced payment.
- Elaboration of an organisational structure and legal basis for AIPA in line with EU requirements.
- Preparation of a Comprehensive documentation covering all the functions of AIPA.

- To draft legal basis for the implementation of all Paying Agency functions following the existing EU requirements.
- To design the organisational structure and chart of AIPA, taking into account EU requirements and best practice such as the separation of functions and segregation of duties.
- To elaborate and approve the human resource strategy for AIPA (incl. staff planning, recruitment, training and appraisal).
- To elaborate the ICT strategy and security policy for AIPA (including e.g. operation and service level agreement, helpdesk, Service-desk, IT objectives, technological concept, quality management and IT organisation), including wider connections with related responsible third parties (e.g. e-Government Centre or Ministry of ICT).
- To prepare written procedures, manuals, guidelines and checklists elaborated for the implementation of approved Rural Development (RD) measures following EU prinicples.
- AIPA´s internal audit unit strengthened to be in line with internationally accepted audit standards.
- To elaborate control plans for the RD measure to ensure AIPA’s compliance with the management and control system requirements according to EU acquis.
- To design training needs analysis (TNA) of the necessary skills required by AIPA for implementation of RD measures in line with EU principles.
- To update the risk identification and management framework.
- To elaborate and update the organisational performance objectives linked to the allocation of resources within AIPA.
- To design the system for the identification, handling and resolution of irregularities and fraud.