Reports of fraud in public procurement have skyrocketed by 87% since 2019, but they remain very few in proportion to the volume of operations, hardly any are investigated, and practically none end up in court. This information is handled by the government itself through the Independent Office for the Regulation and Supervision of Public Procurement (OIReScon), as reported by El Mundo newspaper.
This is the main and most forceful conclusion of the latest annual supervisory report prepared by the agency, and it highlights the limited effectiveness of the control systems themselves against corrupt practices like those identified by the Civil Guard’s Central Operative Unit (UCO) in its devastating report on the collection of kickbacks for public works contracts allegedly shared by the former PSOE Organization Secretary, Santos Cerdán, the former Minister of Transport, José Luis Ábalos, and his advisor in the Ministry, Koldo García.
The report reveals that between 2019 and 2023, fraud complaints related to public procurement increased from 118 to 221. Within this latter figure, those pointing to corrupt practices, which include influence peddling, preferential treatment of companies, or conflict of interest, have increased by 53%, from 28 to 43; meanwhile, those pointing to irregularities in awards have soared by 260%, from 20 to 72.
These amounts are, in any case, minuscule when contextualized within the volume of tenders executed annually by public administrations. Public procurement expenditure in 2023 reached 11.5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 24.9% of total public expenditure, as reflected in the national accounts data from the European statistical office Eurostat.
The report also states that, out of the total of 221 communications received in 2023, only 90 complaints led to the opening of an investigation by anti-fraud authorities. Thus, up to the procedural stage they were in at the close of that fiscal year, the remaining 131 complaints had not had such a consequence. This means that barely four out of ten reported complaints were investigated. And none of them ended up being prosecuted. “None of the 90 communications that finally originated an investigation file have been referred to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for judicial investigation,” notes OIReScon.
