The level of implementation of the recommendations of the Court of Auditors is low. Even if the deadlines expired, only about 1/3 of these recommendations were implemented, 56% weren’t implemented, while 7% were implemented partially, shows a report by Transparency International – Moldova (TIM) entitled “Audit of government procurement compliance: how are the Court of Auditors’ recommendations implemented?”.
In a news conference hosted by IPN, TIM expert Iana Spinei said that the Court of Auditors in 2020-2021 carried out a series of audits to determine government procurement compliance in nine ministries and subordinate entities. Attention was drawn to the imperfect normative framework, the reduced functionality of the Automated Information System “MTender” and to systemic deviations at all the procurement stages. The Court formulated about 260 recommendations for eliminating the inconsistencies and 60% of these were monitored by TIM.
The research shows that in most of the cases, the websites of the audited ministries and subordinate entitles do not contain information about the resuts of audits and the measures taken to implement the Court’s recommendations. According to the report, some of the data about the implementation of recommendations weren’t published on the Court of Auditors’ website even if the entities offered copies of letters sent to the Court to TI-Moldova.
Ianina Spinei noted that some of the reported actions represent promises, such as that the ministry will take attitude to the Court’s recommendations and will name specialists who will monitor the procurement contract. “We consider the annexation to the ministry’s response of an order by which a working group is constituted and the specific duties of each member are described would be the most convincing action. Not promises but concrete deeds are needed, which would be reported to the Court of Auditors,” said the expert.
As regards communication and cooperation with the public authorities, the State Chancellery and Parliament, the Court of Auditors took a series of measures to improve communication with the public authorities and also launched a new instrument for managing the process of implementing the recommendations – the Automated Information System “Audit CCRM”. The authors of the research note that there are positive dynamics in the communication and cooperation with the State Chancellery, about 15% of the measures stipulated in the Government’s action plan for 2022 being introduced at the Court’s suggestion.
In the same news conference, Court of Auditors member Andrei Munteanu said that civil society’s role is indispensable and such monitoring is important as government procurement remains one of the areas that are exposed to the biggest risks of fraud and corruption. “Even if the Court of Auditors in its audit missions always has specific objectives concerning procurement compliance, for the first time in 2020 we set the goal of conducting a system audit in government procurement. We began with analyses that showed that the costs for government procurement as national public budget costs have increased to a significant value. We aimed to cover all the ministries with audits missions and to finally provide a synthesis, an analysis of problems existing in the whole government procurement system,” stated Andrei Munteanu.
The report was produced in the framework of the project “Strengthening the rule of law and democracy: contribution of civil society” that is supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands.
Note: IPN News Agency gives the right of reply to persons who consider they were touched by the news items produced based on statements of the organizers of the given news conference, including by facilitating the organization of another news conference in similar conditions.
