Auditing operation No. 04/21
Funds earmarked for the sector operational programme Industry
The auditing operation was included in the Annual Audit Plan of the Supreme Audit Office (hereinafter referred to as „SAO“) for the year 2004 under No. 04/21. The auditing operation was managed and audit conclusion drawn up by Mr Petr Skála, the Member of the SAO.
The aim of the audit was to examine the provision, the drawing and the usage of the funds earmarked for the sector operational programme Industry.
The audited period covered the years 2001 to 2004.
The audited bodies were the Ministry of Industry and Trade (hereinafter referred to as „MIT“), the Investment and Business Development Agency CzechInvest, and selected beneficiaries.
The aim of the sector operational programme, in terms of preparing the system for planning, managing, monitoring and evaluating the programme for EU funds drawing in the future, was fulfilled only partially. The MIT used the experience gained from the implementation of the sector operational programme. For drawing the funds from the Structural Funds from 2004, the MIT created a new programme, for which it did not adopt the implementation and management structure already created for the sector operational programme nor the methodology for assessing applications. It also used different personnel for the new programme than for the sector operational programme.
Shortcomings were detected particularly in the area of the evaluation system, whose efficiency and benefit of the industry development will not be possible to evaluate, which would be insufficient in evaluating efficiency and benefit for the development of industry, because:
Evaluation of the benefits for the development of industry brought by the funds expended had not been completed at the time the audit was carried out. In ongoing monitoring carried out jointly with CzechInvest, the MIT evaluated the projects positively. However the audit carried out at beneficiaries ascertained that, in a quarter of the audited projects supported in 2001 and 2002, the expected impact on the economic results of the businesses will be delayed by two or three years.
The impact of the sector operational programme on the development of industry was substantially limited by the fact that the programme was not financed to the extent originally intended, when, contrary to plan, EU pre-accession funds could not have been drawn for some co-financed projects because they did not received full subsidy from government funds.
In implementing the operational programme for business and industry as instruments of the EU Structural Funds it is desirable that the MIT eliminates the shortcomings that have been discovered in the sector operational programme, especially in the area of target-setting and indicators for evaluating individual stages of the programmes and projects.