If the mayor is not exemplary, who will respect him? The proverb could not be more timely when analyzing an entrenched situation in Spain: the failure of the different administrations to render their budgets before the Court of Accounts or the regional bodies that must endorse them and guarantee their rigor. The problem is that this State institution, whose members are elected by the Courts, has no sanctioning capacity over the administrations, even though it can prosecute their accounts.
In the last financial year, corresponding to the year 2021, 41.38% of the municipalities did not present their accounts within the required period and, as of today, 36.21% still do not, according to data from the court itself. These non-compliance figures, which drag on year after year, are even larger in the case of island councils and councils, associations and metropolitan areas, the public bodies that present a higher degree of non-compliance. In all cases, without this entailing any type of legal consequence.
“Indeed, there is a problem with accountability and it is an issue that worries us because it affects the quality of the information that is provided to citizens in relation to the performance of public institutions. At the local level, this problem of accountability has a special dimension”, acknowledges the director of the Technical Office of the Court of Accounts, Santiago Martínez Argüelles.
Beyond a modification of the law that regulates the Court of Accounts to establish sanctions for administrations that fail to comply with the surrender, something that has not been promoted by any government in the 40 years of existence of this body, various autonomous communities have raised the possibility to establish this compliance in the bases of calls for aid, although none has done so to date.
As if this is not enough, the doubts raised by this model of control of public accounts go further and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Spain has also raised the need for administrations to submit to an independent audit, as many companies do by legal imperative, following the example of many European countries. In Spain, only Navarra carries out an annual audit of the accounts of the local entities of the community of more than 9,000 inhabitants, voluntarily and with the collaboration of private auditors in the field work.
“Both the Court of Accounts and the municipal auditors carry out their function adequately. The role of auditors is different. We defend a systematic annual audit of the municipal accounts, which would result in greater transparency and would contribute to citizen confidence”, reflects the president of the Col·legi de Censors Jurats de Comptes de Catalunya, Antoni Gómez.
The public accounts control bodies of countries such as Italy or Portugal regularly use the support of auditing companies and France is currently carrying out a pilot plan in this regard. On the other hand, the institution that represents Spanish auditors points out that in the European Union, only Spain, Malta, Romania and Greece do not present consolidated accounts of local entities. That is, together with municipal companies and other dependent bodies, which makes it difficult to know the reality of the accounts.
Given their own resources, the work methods of both the Court of Accounts and the regional control bodies do not have much to do with that of audit companies, as they habitually use sampling techniques and supervision limited to some accounting areas.
