SAO audited billions spent on basic registers: ageing infrastructure has not been renewed and is still lacking zero-downtime operation

PRESS RELEASE ON AUDIT NO 23/05 - 10 June 2024


The system of basic registers does not meet the increasing requirements for the level of digitalisation of public administration. The Ministry of the Interior (MoI) and the now defunct Basic Registers Administration* (BRA) have not ensured the renewal of the ageing basic registers infrastructure. In terms of its operational parameters, the basic registers system still corresponds to the time of its creation, i.e. 2012. The MoI and the BRA have not ensured that the system is available with zero-downtime, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These measures should have been completed by the end of 2019. The above-mentioned shortcomings were revealed by the Supreme Audit Office (SAO) auditors when they examined the management of state funds earmarked for the basic registers system. According to the auditors, tens of millions of the total CZK 2.46 billion spent in 2015-2022 on the operation and transformation of the basic registers system were spent in an ineffective and uneconomical way.

In 2018, the MoI prepared a concept for the transformation of the basic registers, the fundamental change of which was to be that the registers would no longer serve only for sharing information within the public administration, but also for citizens, regardless of the working hours of the authorities. The concept therefore defined the need to ensure and guarantee the availability of the basic registers system in a 24×7 mode. More than four years after the set deadline, the continuous availability is not ensured.

There are always system outages. This may be one of the reasons for the situation where 2,923 agency information systems out of a total of 5,118 systems using the basic registers' reference data create local copies of them. By copying reference data, they become only 'information data', which may not correspond to the real (current) situation and thus lack the validity of reference data for the performance of public administration agendas.

The failure of the MoI and the BRA to ensure zero-downtime operation has led, among other things, to the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre (COSMC) and the Czech Statistical Office (CSO) spending tens of millions in connection with the introduction of zero-downtime operation ineffectively.

The SAO also found that since the start of the operation of the basic registers system between 2008 and 2012, all registries, with the exception of the registry at COSMC, have been operated and developed by the same contractors under repeated contracts. The registry administrators have thus become dependent on a particular supplier (vendor lock-in). The SAO assessed this long-standing situation as a risk to the economy of spending.

The SAO assessed the fact that the MoI had paid flat-rate sums to suppliers for the provision of extended warranty support services from the date of acceptance of the components as indicative of a breach of budgetary discipline. According to the auditors, this procedure resulted in uneconomical spending of funds worth approximately CZK 4.4 million out of the total amount of CZK 9.1 million paid to suppliers.

The SAO’s audit verified that despite the above-mentioned shortcomings, the basic registers system fulfilled the role of a basic data source of public administration. In the period 2015-2023, it mediated about 8 billion transactions and was used, for example, as the main source of data for the census of population, houses and flats carried out by the CSO in 2021. The CSO spent a total of CZK 1.815 billion on the census. This amount also includes a contractual remuneration of approximately CZK 1 billion for the Czech Post; at the time of the SAO audit’s completion in December 2023, this remuneration had not been subject to final accounts.

The system of basic registers consists of, among others, the register of persons, the register of inhabitants, the register of territorial identification of addresses and immovable property, the register of rights and obligations, and the Information System of Basic Registers, which provides links between the individual basic registers and other services. The system of basic registers is a key element in the computerisation of public administration and is a source of reference data on citizens, legal entities, real estate, etc. Demand from citizens and private entities for continuous digital public administration services has been growing significantly. At the same time, digitalisation is leading to changes that place increased demands on the use of data from the basic register system. These form the backbone of the interconnected public administration data pool, whose basic function is to implement the principles of "data once-only" and "data circulate, not people" in the common practice of public administration in the Czech Republic.

Communication Department
Supreme Audit Office

* The administration of the basic registers was abolished as of 1 January 2024.

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