Prague, June 29 (CTK) – The Czech state spent almost 230 million crowns inefficiently to make civil service more efficient in 2007-2014, the Supreme Audit Office (NKU) said in its press release Monday.
The state was rather creating methodologies repeatedly that had no real impact, the NKU added.
The NKU has already filed a legal complaint over the audit results. It refers to four checked projects in which the NKU inspectors found out a suspicion of breach of trust out of negligence, breach of the regulations on economic competition rules and harming the EU’s financial interests, NKU spokeswoman Olga Malkova told CTK.
This is a legal complaint based on facts proving that a crime was committed, not a complaint against an unknown perpetrator, she added.
The Smart Administration strategy was to secure a more efficient public administration.
The NKU has checked eight projects worth 226.6 million crowns from the European operational programme Human Resources and Employment, including a planned information system to administer data on the Smart Administration projects.
“Instead, only methodologies of the project and strategic management were created repeatedly within these projects that had no real impact on streamlining public administration, however,” the NKU auditors concluded.
The auditors have checked the interior and industry and trade ministries and the Government Office, while the Interior Ministry was the main guarantor of the strategy.
However, the ministry did not set what should be achieved by 2015, and consequently, it could not assess whether it succeeded, the NKU said.
Its auditors have checked whether particular goals of the eight monitored projects were met.
“They have found out that seven projects did not fulfil the goals, and thus they did not contribute to a more efficient public administration and lower costs of paperwork. The means for these projects were used ineffectively, which the NKU has assessed as breach of budget discipline worth 226.6 million crowns,” the NKU auditors said.
The Interior Ministry did not have enough information about the projects, it did not create an information system and this is why it had no reliable documents for the management and assessment of the strategy, the auditors added.
The NKU has mainly criticised the fact that the projects were not connected with a particular goal of the strategy from the beginning. In addition, coordination on inter-ministerial level did not work.
According to the NKU,
