Central Registry of Administrative Buildings cost CZK 550 million. The data contained in it is wrong and unreliable, it should help the state to manage assets.

Press release for audit No. 16/26, 11th December 2017


The Supreme Audit Office focused on the operation and the use of state or state-used real estate in 2014 to 2015 when using the data from related information systems. These systems had been developed to provide relevant information on these buildings and to contribute to their better use, and also to reduce the cost of their management and operation. The SAO selected the Office for Government Representation in Property Affairs (OGRPA) for the audit, which is responsible for data management in the Central Registry of Administrative Buildings (CRAB) and the Ministry of the Interior (MoI), which manages the information system of the MoI called the Real Estate Management (REM). In 2014 and 2015, facilities of the Ministry of the Interior formed a substantial part of the buildings registered in the CRAB - about a third of the buildings in the registry.

Since the launch of CRAB in 2012, the quality of the data on buildings has been low. For example, the total office space did not equal the sum of the office space used and unused, some economic data was missing, or the information on the rented areas differed in various outputs generated from the registry. The MoI also contributed to the limited data collected, when entered the expenditure for the management, operation and maintenance of buildings only for one quarter of the year instead of the whole year 2015 in the CRAB database. This significantly distorted CRAB data compared to data in the REM by more than CZK 520 million. Such data cannot help state organisations to reduce the cost of managing and operating the buildings.

The data unreliability can also be demonstrated on the example of the OGRPA. According to it, the total cost of operating the state-used buildings decreased by CZK 409 million year on year and one of the main reasons should have been the use of the CRAB. The saving was calculated by comparing the data in the registry for the years 2014 and 2015. The auditors found that such a result was distorted by more than CZK 520 million by the already mentioned incomplete expenditure and no such saving was made. The OGRPA also stated that in 2015, thanks to its steps and the use of the CRAB, it managed to save CZK 87 million. The SAO found that the activities of the OGRPA and the use of CRAB data saved CZK 26 million at maximum.

One reason for creating the CRAB was the effort to make available complete information about assets in one place. By 2015, the CRAB contained data of around 3,800 state or state-used buildings out of a total of approximately 40,000 state-owned buildings. In 2016, however, the MoI used the legal possibilities to exclude CRAB data from most of its registered buildings, which reduced the number of objects in the registry to about 2,700. The creation and the operation of the CRAB was more than CZK 550 million from 2010 to 2016. Its annual operation costs were CZK 70 million, so the management of one object in the registry for the year 2016 cost approximately CZK 27,000.

The audit further revealed systemic shortcomings affecting the whole real estate management area. At present, the state has no clear objectives to achieve in managing and using its real estate. If the state determines what indicators are important and which ones to monitor (occupancy of buildings, operating expenses per 1 sqm, etc.), the number of mandatory data recorded for each building in the CRAB that could be substantially reduced. These are at least 255 for each object.

Good practice in state facility management can be found abroad - for example, the UK had approved its strategy of the real estate´s management and, in 2010 to 2016, the average area per employee was reduced from 13 sqm to 10 sqm.

There is selected data on state institutions which the SAO used in the audit enclosed to the audit report. Thematically similar data was also used in the First Hackathon of Public Administration, organised by the SAO together with other state institutions and partners in September this year.

The deadline for publishing the results of this audit has been postponed due to cooperation with the law enforcement authorities that requested information on the audit.

Communication department
Supreme Audit Office

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