The closing account and financial statements of the Ministry of Agriculture for 2017 did not contain significant misstatements
Press release to audit No. 17/31 – 13. 8. 2018
The Supreme Audit Office examined the closing account of the state budget chapter of the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), its bookkeeping and preparation of the financial statements for the year 2017. The auditors also focused on data that was submitted by the MoA in 2017 for evaluating the implementation of the state budget and from which the financial statement is subsequently drawn up.
The audit showed that the closing account of the MoA for 2017 was compiled to the required extent and the information contained therein was not subject to significant misstatements.
Already in the course of the audit, the MoA corrected audit mistakes worth CZK 1.6 billion, which the SAO had revealed. These were mainly the correction of accounting of financial corrections, cash flow statements, or rectification of evaluation of contingent liability in a litigation. In the view of the SAO, the MoA's financial statements for 2017 provide a true and fair view of the subject matter of the accounting.
In the course of the audit, the Ministry of Agriculture also corrected inaccuracies exceeding CZK 100 million, which the auditors found in the data submitted by the Ministry of Agriculture for evaluating the implementation of the state budget. In this case, this was in particular a correction of the generic classification of expenditure on membership fees to international organizations and cost of transfers provided to voluntary unions of municipalities. The MoA’s financial statement for 2017 did not contain any significant misstatements.
The SAO examined as well how the Ministry of Agriculture had remedied the shortcomings identified by previous SAO audits. It emerged that the MoA had taken corrective measures to most of the deficiencies. One of the persistent shortcomings was that the Ministry of Agriculture did not pay all funds to be received by the state budget within the specified time limits to the state budget. This breached the budgetary rules. For 2017, it was more than five and a half million crowns.
The audit also revealed that the Ministry of Agriculture did not publish all contracts subject to this obligation in the register of contracts. Since it subsequently accepted the transactions for which it was paid, it breached the budgetary rules in addition to the contract registers law.
Communication Department
Supreme Audit Office