Court of Auditors warns of opacity of European funds: “There is no data on what reaches the final recipients”

Nadia proud spainSpanish former Minister of Economic Affairs Nadia Calviño

In its Audit Report on the measures of the Administration on the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Plan, sent this week to Las Cortes – and reported by the newspaper El Mundo – the Court of Auditors calls for more transparency: “There are no published data that allow us to have knowledge of the funds that reach the final recipients”, says the Court of Auditors, despite the execution reports presented in Las Cortes by the first vice-president, Nadia Calviño, published on the website set up by La Moncloa (the seat of the Presidency) for this purpose.

“The implementation reports published on the website to present the progress of the PRTR (Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan) provide excessively general information on the state of implementation of investments and reforms, on the main instruments for distributing the Plan’s funds: tenders, subsidies and PERTE (Strategic Projects for Economic Recovery and Transformation), as well as on the budgetary management carried out by the State and the allocation of funds to the autonomous communities, which does not facilitate adequate and complete monitoring of progress in the implementation of the Plan or provide an accurate view of its degree of compliance”, the audit body criticises in its report.

This institution – chaired by Enriqueta Chicano at the proposal of the PSOE – joins the criticisms already made by the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility and the Bank of Spain regarding the lack of information on the real execution of the funds and their arrival in the real economy.
La Moncloa refers to what it publishes on its website about the plan, but, according to the Court of Auditors, this “does not directly provide information on the fulfilment of milestones and objectives, nor on the state of implementation of investments and reforms, unlike what happens in most of the countries around us”.

Their conclusion is that “the website only provides global budgetary information on the execution of funds referring to the PRTR as a whole. Disaggregated information is not available on this portal”.


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