Auditing operation No. 03/13
State Budget Funds for the Programme Construction and Reconstruction of Elementary and Secondary School Buildings and Structures
The auditing operation was included in the Annual Audit Plan of the Supreme Audit Office (hereinafter referred to as „SAO“) for the year 2003 under No. 03/13. The auditing operation was managed and audit conclusion drawn up by Mr. Rudolf Němeček, the Member of the SAO.
The aim of the audit was to examine the fulfilment of the programme and the management of the State Budget funds spent on the reproduction of the tangible fixed assets (i.e. constructions) of elementary and secondary schools.
The audited period covered the years 2000 and 2001 as well as related periods in case of relevant connections.
The audited bodies were the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and twenty-four selected beneficiaries.
The expenses for the audited programmes from the State Budget amounted to 7,717,584 thousand CZK in the period from 2000 to 2001; 4,782,293 thousand CZK of that from the Ministry of Finance’s programme administrator and 2,935,291 thousand CZK of that from the programme administrator of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.
Deficiencies in the activities of the programme administrators and selected programme participants were discovered by the audit.
Programme Administrators:
- Provided the preparation phase of the tangible fixed asset reproduction process incompletely, i.e. defining material, time and financial conditions for the implementation of the programmes, which elicited a number of changes in the time and especially the financial demands during the course of the implementation;
- Issued decisions on the conditions of drawing the subsidies. These decisions contained many deficiencies;
- Did not ensure supervisory activities, or they could give no evidence that the control had been carried out.
Considering the absence of programme documentation, it is not possible to examine the implementation of the programmes and the fulfilment of the aims that were supposed to be achieved. It is also not evident when the financing of the programmes will be finished and whether it will be possible to carry out the closing evaluation of the programmes.
Programme Participants:
- Breached the binding indicators specified in the decisions, primarily by not observing the share of their own resources on financing the event, by incorrectly using the intentionally specified funding, by providing deposits to subcontractors in the incorrect amounts, by not adhering to the dates of the implementation of the event and by not submitting the closing programme evaluation documentation to the project administrator by the specified time;
- Did not act in accordance with the regulations of the Public Procurement Act, primarily by incorrectly submitting public tenders, by not expelling applicants who did not fulfil the qualifying conditions and closing contracts for work with them. They closed contracts for work in which the contract price did not correspond to the bid price; they increased the contract price during the implementation of the event;
- They did not proceed in accordance with the regulations of the Act on Accounting, primarily by incorrectly booking into accounts the prepayments provided and incorrectly booking into accounts the finished investments. Formally executed stocktaking did not detect the deficiencies in the accounting;
- It was ascertained that, with some of the audited bodies, investment designs were overestimated and school facilities do not fully utilise their capacity.