Lucia Salinas
08/11/2020 - 17:57
- Clarín.com
- Politics
The Office of the Attorney for Administrative Investigations (PIA) led by Sergio Rodríguez, made a presentation before the Access to Public Information Agency, after analyzing 232 records of State purchases during the Covid pandemic19. As he concluded, the committed sum of money in these contracts is 6,280 million pesos, but only 45% of the files did not have official publicity . "Less than half were published by the established channels", while "30.60% of these files did not have any type of advertising." Rodríguez requested that the Agency intervene, after the ruling party resists auditing these acquisitions in the General Auditor of the Nation, as claimed by the opposition.
The health emergency caused by Covid19 exposed some irregularities in the administrative processes for purchasing goods, supplies and food. This led to an investigation initiated by the PIA, which has jurisdiction over everything that the State may affect the public purse, and which put 40 government agencies under scrutiny.
It all started when the PIA's Intake and Early Detection Unit (UADT), when trying to determine which were the direct purchases made, encountered several obstacles. The motives? "The reigning disorganization in terms of the lack of transparency, visibility and inefficiency in the management of state activity in matters of public information," they warned in the area.
The proposal that opened the investigation maintains that the data published is "late, imprecise and incomplete" and that this " results in an extraordinary breeding ground of opportunities for the commission of acts of corruption ." For this reason, the General Auditor of the Nation (AGN) had been asked to initiate an extraordinary summary, but the agency refused to advance in that investigation.
Faced with a series of irregularities detected regarding the transparency of the publication of more than 200 purchases, and when detecting "the lack of publicity of the purchases made and the clear breaches by the different organizations with respect to the advertising requirements", the PIA made a presentation to the Access to Public Information Agency.
According to the report, accessed by Clarín , the different pages of official sites, that is, the Official Gazette and the National Contracting Office (ONC), in addition to the pages of different organizations, were compiled, "obtaining a totally inconsistent situation picture , with lack of information and without correspondence with the data obtained after the different requisitions carried out ".
In all cases, the PIA pointed out, "when carrying out the direct contracting of goods and services necessary to attend the emergency, the agencies had to proceed to their subsequent publication, both on the website of the National Contracting Office and in the Official Gazette. ".
During the investigation carried out by the prosecutor Rodríguez, "innumerable requirements had to be made that to date do not allow knowing for sure which agencies acquired goods or services , through what procedure, to whom they awarded or what was the amount of award, despite the fact that almost 3 months have passed since the start of the proceedings . "
As a result of the studies carried out, it was pointed out that the amounts of 6,280.5 million pesos, 25.2 million dollars and 787,434 euros were paid or committed in the 232 purchase files .
Of these totals, it was determined that only "41.81% of the files (97 folders) were publicized in both BO and ONC, that is, less than half of the 232 files from which the information was accessed were published by the two established channels ".
Meanwhile, 30.60% of said files "did not have any type of publicity."
If the analysis is made according to the money committed, it was detected that only "29.60% of the sums in national currency disbursed (1,859,191,885.30 pesos) had advertising in both organizations where the purchases of the National State should be disseminated", something that for the PIA " is extremely worrying, especially if it is taken into account that only 1% was reached for expenditures in dollars and euros ."
At this point, the prosecutor Rodríguez referred to the " opacity of the Administration in relation to the acquisition of goods and services . " The data is that these shortcomings and little transparency were observed in the analysis of only one month of the almost "six that have elapsed since Decree 260/20" was issued.