Criticism against the superior auditor rages days after his appearance in Congress for the errors in his report

Far from being extinguished, the controversy in Mexico over the latest report by the Superior Audit of the Federation (ASF) is fueled, a fire fed mainly from the National Palace.

This Friday, the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, charged again against the supervisory body, which on Saturday released a wrong analysis on the cost of canceling the airport promoted by the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto.

"What they did makes the institution look ridiculous," said the president, a comment that goes up one step on the ladder of reproaches to the ASF.

At a time of great confusion about the possible causes of the error, López Obrador has said that the auditors acted "in bad faith", although he has not shared any evidence to prove his complaint.

Meanwhile, the opposition criticizes the servility of the ASF, which rejected its own conclusions about the airport just after the president's first broadside on Monday.

This Friday, the chief executive insisted that the government does not undermine any institution.

"What happens is that they are desperate, their courage clouds them," he said, referring to his adversaries.

Be that as it may, the Government and the opposition coincide in pointing out the responsibility of the head of the ASF, David Colmenares, who will appear before the Chamber of Deputies on Monday.

Independent from the technical point of view, the supervisory body depends organically on the parliament.

The rumor about the departure of the auditor is gaining strength, as none of the explanations used so far seems to calm critics, including his predecessor in office, Juan Manuel Portal.

Whether it was a mistake or a political maneuver, the credibility of the institution has been called into question.

On Thursday, Colmenares met the criticism in an interview with journalist Joaquín López Dóriga.

"There was no bad faith," said Colmenares, "there may be errors and we formed a working group with different auditors to review the issue.

It is a priority for us to be clear ”.

To questions from the interviewer, Colmenares replied that he does not have to resign.

"I don't feel guilty about anything, on the contrary," he said.

Colmenares will attend a working meeting of the Chamber of Deputies Surveillance Commission on Monday, to discuss the result of the set of reports presented last week, the second installment of the review of the public account for 2019, the first year of Government of López Obrador.

This, after the president reported on Thursday that he had sent a letter to the president of the chamber demanding an investigation into what happened.

The path that the committee or the House will take is not very clear.

According to the Law on Auditing and Accountability, the Chamber of Deputies, the supervisory agent of the ASF, has the power to dismiss the superior auditor under a series of assumptions.

In any case, the promoters of the dismissal would require a qualified majority, a path that goes through adding Morena to the cause.

Elected in the first half of 2018 for a period of eight years, Colmenares received the support of the majority in the Chamber, then in the hands of the PRI, but also of Morena and his allies, the Verme Party or the Evangelicals of Encuentro Social.

Even legislators from the right wing of Acción Nacional and the leftist PRD voted for him.

With the airport scandal, the majority that supported Colmenares could wane, especially on the side of Morena, after the criticism of López Obrador, his moral leader.

The political party is also the current owner of the majority in the chamber.

Not just the airport

The anger with the auditor also transcends the last report of the body and points to its logic of work and planning.

In a conversation with EL PAÍS this week, Marco Fernández, professor and researcher at the School of Government of the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, explained that the problem begins with the choice of the agencies to be audited year after year and the type of analysis that is chosen in each case.

Fernández has been very critical of the ASF for the type of audit he chose to study the airport of the previous government, in the hands of the PRI.

Instead of a performance audit, he explained, they should have chosen a forensic one, more thorough in spending analysis.

Fernández also affirmed that in recent months, the Tec's School of Government and other organizations, in the case of México Evalúa or Transparencia Mexicana, have participated in various working groups with the Chamber of Deputies' Surveillance Commission.

In the first, last December, Mexico Evalúa presented the report The ASF and the superior audit in times of majorities.

Overall, the organization's conclusion is that ASF has made decisions about the number and type of audits it does without accountability.

Another of the conclusions points to the effectiveness of the ASF: many of the irregularities that it indicates are not sustained, the amount of money it recovers is meager and the complaints it presents to the Attorney General's Office rarely end in sentence.

The Tecnológico de Monterrey academic added that Morena's deputies on the Commission "were very critical of Colmenares" after the report was presented.

In a subsequent meeting, following the publication of the ASF audit plan for this year, in which they analyzed the 2020 spending, civil society organizations raised their concern.

Fernández recalled it like this: “We told them that the ASF makes many changes during the year, they cancel some audits, they incorporate others, but they never report the reason for these changes.

They do not report why they determine one approach or another for an audit ”.

The expert pointed out one of the key questions: "How is it possible that for the 2021 audit plan there is not a single forensic audit contemplated?"

Subscribe here

to the

newsletter

of EL PAÍS México and receive all the informative keys of the current situation of this country