The Sindicatura de Comptes commission met this morning in Parliament to receive the annual report on the general accounts of local corporations. In the ordinary session, in which the mayor, Miquel Salazar, has appeared, along with other members of the auditing body of the public accounts of Catalonia, it has been requested for the first time that the possibility of imposing fines on municipalities that do not Deliver the required information in a timely manner.
Until now, it had never been considered that those local entities that failed to comply with the delivery deadlines established by law would be subject to coercive measures. It is, above all, points out sources from the Sindicatura de Comptes, of small municipalities, which on many occasions are repeat offenders in their delay in rendering accounts.
The law establishes October 15 of the year following the closing of the budgets as the deadline for submitting to the Sindicatura de Comptes the detailed report of all local income and expenses, in which all items must be recorded, including those intended for municipal companies or to defray the services contracted to external companies.
Although the deadlines, according to sources from the Sindicatura de Comptes, are very long and could, in fact, be reduced with the efficient application of new information technologies, a third of Catalan municipalities do not file on time, or do so in a timely manner. incomplete, their public accounts before the supervisory body. To a large extent, because small towns share the intervention with other municipalities and lack sufficient resources.
Until now, the only measure that exists in Catalonia to encourage compliance in a timely manner with municipal accountability is the penalty by the Generalitat, which freezes the processing of subsidies and transfers provided for in its budget to those municipalities that appear in the list that each year the Sindicatura de Comptes sends to the Department of Governance to report that they have not yet sent the information.
But the trustee Manel Rodríguez, in charge of supervising the local sector, has opened this Thursday the possibility of following in the footsteps of the Valencian Community, the autonomy with higher levels of compliance, and applying fines to municipalities that are late. However, he has not specified how these sanctions would be carried out. If it would be the same Sindicatura de Comptes, as in Valencia, the one in charge of imposing the fines or it would be another organism of the administration the one that activated the process.
Rodríguez, on the other hand, has insisted that the Government should establish by decree the criteria for coordinating the assistance and cooperation functions of local corporations in order to integrate these functions into a global system and achieve "effective" joint action and eliminate dysfunctionalities.
