Czech National Bank expenditures for property acquisition and operations
Auditing operation No. 04/35
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. 04/35. The auditing operation was managed and the audit conclusion drawn up by Mr. Jiří Kalivoda, the Member of the SAO.
The aim of the audit was to examine the Czech National Bank management of its expenditures for property acquisition and operations.
The audited period covered the years 2002 to 2004 as well as previous periods in certain cases of relevant connections.
The audited body was the Czech National Bank (hereinafter referred to as “CNB”), the audit was performed at the headquarter and at the CNB branches České Budějovice, Ústí nad Labem, Hradec Králové and Brno.
The SAO audit mandate is at the CNB delimited to the area of expenditures for property acquisition and operations. The economy management of the CNB is legally specified only in general.
The audit detected that the CNB Budgets included not all expenditures nor entire planned income in the audited period. There it was not possible to ascertain how large were resources covering budgetary expenditures, how they were structured, and what balances were between income and expenses related to CNB everyday running.
The audit also detected expenditures, which were drawn and recorded in such a way that they resulted in inaccurate information on the actual amount of some expenditures. Some individual cases influenced negatively economy. Some partial imperfections also occurred on stocktaking and contracting procedures. The CNB adopted and implemented remedy actions to react to a large part of these findings already during the audit.
The legal provision does not specify positively, what the property is administered by the CNB. Some doubts arise whether certain parts of this property are in ownership of the state given in charge on the CNB or own CNB’s property. Unambiguousness of an exact ownership can cause serious problems.
The unambiguous wording of legal regulations should contribute to improve conditions for the CNB economy management and its ownership circumstances. Such an amendment should also consider general rules for the economy management with the state property, which are mainly represented by the Act. No. 219/2000 Coll., on Act on the property of the Czech Republic and its appearance in legal relations.