Transparency concerns have emerged around a 2025 official cybersecurity training trip taken by two senior members of the Dominican Republic’s Central Electoral Board (JCE) to Spain, after local newspaper Diario Libre revealed that the agency’s official response to public inquiries failed to refute key spending details, while leaving critical questions about costs, trip duration and policy compliance unanswered.
In a detailed response sent to the outlet, the JCE defended its mandate to carry out international professional activities and emphasized the growing critical importance of strengthening cybersecurity for electoral institutions. However, Diario Libre’s review of the response confirms the JCE did not challenge core reported facts: JCE board members Hirayda Fernández and Samir Chami Isa traveled to the Spanish city of León between July 12 and 26, 2025, and each received $12,000 in per diem payments, calculated at a daily rate of $800.
When combined with round-trip airfare for the two officials, the total public cost of the trip amounts to $33,294.27, according to the newspaper’s accounting.
A key point of contention raised by Diario Libre is the mismatch between the length of the trip and the duration of the training itself. The Cybersecurity Summer BootCamp the officials attended only ran from July 14 to 24, totaling roughly 40 hours of structured instruction. This 11-day training window leaves two extra days on the front end and two days on the back end of the 15-day trip unaccounted for, leading the outlet to question what official electoral business justifies collecting per diem for the full 15-day period.
The JCE has stated that it maintains full documentation of the trip’s itinerary, duration, travel arrangements and administrative justifications, and Diario Libre acknowledges that releasing these records to the public would be the clearest path to resolving outstanding questions. So far, however, the agency has not made these materials public.
A second unresolved issue centers on the JCE’s per diem policy itself. The agency cites Act 18/2005 as the legal basis that authorizes the $800 daily per diem rate for its board members, but Diario Libre reports that it has been unable to locate a public version of this legislation. The outlet is now calling on the JCE to publish the full text of the act, along with the official per diem rate schedule and any amendments that have been made to the policy since it was enacted.
Additional clarifications the newspaper has requested include a breakdown of what expenses the $800 daily payment is intended to cover – which typically includes accommodation, meals, local transit and incidentals in standard public per diem policies – as well as whether the JCE requires officials to return any unused per diem funds to public coffers.
While Diario Libre says it accepts the JCE’s position that international professional development and cybersecurity training are legitimate priorities for electoral management bodies, the outlet maintains that the inherent value of such work does not remove the obligation for public entities to account for how taxpayer money is spent, nor to demonstrate that spending is efficient and aligned with stated institutional goals.
In its conclusion, the newspaper stresses that the core of the dispute is not whether international travel or cybersecurity training is a justifiable use of public resources. Instead, the issue at hand is whether public funds are managed with full transparency, and whether every official trip can demonstrate clear, measurable benefits for the electoral institution that authorized it.
At present, Diario Libre is urging the JCE to meet public demand for accountability by publishing all relevant trip documentation, outlining its per diem policy in full, providing a detailed breakdown of all activities carried out by the two officials during their 15-day stay in Spain, and sharing the specific tangible outcomes the trip delivered for the JCE.