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Health Minister Spahn with protective mask: "Avoidable over-procurement"
Photo: MARKUS SCHREIBER / AFP
The Federal Audit Office (BRH) is taking a hard case with the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) in an audit report on the procurement of protective equipment in the corona crisis.
The house of Jens Spahn (CDU) procured far too many masks in a disorderly process and accepted enormous expenses in the process.
The financial controllers complain that the purchases by a working group in the ministry resulted in the total of 5.8 billion masks procured by the Ministry of Health itself, an annual requirement of 4.7 billion protective masks calculated by the Ministry of Health »on the basis of extraneous assumptions by 23 percent «Exceeded. In the case of FFP-2 masks alone, Spahn's ministry procured a billion units in Germany with "thirteen times the minimum requirement" and "eight times the quantities delivered to the federal states and associations of statutory health insurance physicians to date," criticized the Federal Audit Office.
The generous purchase of masks is expensive: In addition to the procurement costs of 6.3 billion euros, there are »annex costs« of 320 million euros so far, which could further increase due to legal disputes and possible disposal costs for excessively procured and expired goods, it is said.
The Bonn auditors credit the Ministry of Health with the fact that the task was very difficult during the peak of the pandemic.
And yet: the "over-procurement of this magnitude" was "avoidable", according to the judgment of the 50-page long report that SPIEGEL has received.
"Many decisions and individual measures are insufficiently documented and cannot be understood."
Federal Audit Office on the procurement of masks by the Ministry of Health
With this, the examiners come up with a drastic summary of their research and bring the Union man Spahn, who is already under fire in the mask affair, further into need of explanation. The BRH officials describe chaotic conditions in the ministry in their test report. "Many decisions and individual measures are inadequately documented in the BMG and cannot be traced," writes the Court of Auditors: "Some of them were not reconstructed or were only reconstructed afterwards and with a considerable time lag." Above all, the Ministry's measures for volume control are complete were insufficient.
The audit office had tried for months to get an overview of the masks procurement in the past year. It was complicated for the officials that the Spahn employees had obtained protective equipment in various ways. On the one hand, there were direct contracts without tendering, often with the participation of Spahn himself, as SPIEGEL discovered in the case of the Swiss company Emix Trading, among other things. Lobbyists such as the daughter of the CSU political veteran Gerold Tandler or the CSU politician Georg Nüßlein, who has since resigned, also contributed to the multi-million dollar purchases. There were high commissions.
Another procurement method was the so-called open house procedure. Mask dealers were able to deliver unlimited quantities of FFP2 masks to the ministry at a fixed price of EUR 4.50 each. They received a purchase guarantee for this, provided the quality of the masks was right. In this way, the Court of Auditors lists, "budget commitments" of 6.5 billion euros arose. "The contracted procurement quantities exceeded both the minimum requirement assessment and the delivery quantities many times over," writes the Court of Auditors.
At times, the Ministry of Health did not have a "sufficient basis for controlling the procurement processes," complained the BRH.
This is also the reason why the use of funds was "inefficient".
The chaos has led to the fact that the protective equipment has "in many cases not yet been used to combat pandemics," it says.
Ministry refers to "time pressure"
According to the report, Spahn's ministry defended itself against the Federal Audit Office, among other things, with the fact that the procurement of protective equipment was under "immense time pressure".
The global demand triggered by the pandemic far exceeded the supply available on the market, so the argumentation of the BMG.
The result was skyrocketing prices and tough international competition, especially for protective masks.
In order to get protective equipment as quickly as possible, the ministry decided to use different procurement channels at the same time.
Due to the urgency, the competitive deadlines were "evidently impossible" to adhere to.
The Court of Auditors' report is likely to be particularly explosive in relation to the lawsuits brought against the federal government by around 60 mask dealers from the open house proceedings before the Bonn Regional Court. Spahn's house had refused to accept the goods, according to the dealers for flimsy reasons. In truth, the ministry realized too late that it had ordered too many masks and is now trying to avoid its obligation.
This suspicion is fueled by the auditors' main allegation that the federal government has clearly overbought.
Conversely, even after the open-house procedure, the BMG had concluded direct contracts with other dealers without an invitation to tender, even though enough masks had long been on the way.
Against the background of the Court of Auditors' report, this now appears even more dubious.
The Swiss company Emix, which was supposed to deliver goods worth almost a billion euros in total, was again one of the beneficiaries of the massive masks procurement.
Warning of expensive disposal
The BRH has not only examined the hectic initial phase of the pandemic. The auditors also scrutinized the establishment of the so-called National Health Protection Reserve, or NRGS for short. It should help avoid similar supply bottlenecks in the future as in the corona pandemic. The inspectors are skeptical about the administrative qualities of the Ministry of Health. "The conception of the NRGS must aim to make future pandemic preparedness efficient, and must not serve to justify decisions made in the acute crisis regarding PPE procurement or to update them in the long term."
The BRH officials are alluding to the fact that the ministry is simply pushing masks that are too concerned about into the national reserve, also in order to apparently cover up errors in the procurement process. Obviously, the Court of Auditors is concerned that the insufficiently functioning processes will continue. "In the opinion of the Federal Court of Auditors, the structure of the NRGS must not simply be based on the existing structures," the officials therefore write.
Meanwhile, according to the Court of Auditors, the federal government is threatened with further costs: Due to the "massive over-procurement", the Federal Ministry of Health will have up to 1.4 billion particle-filtering half masks and 3.4 billion medical mouth and nose protective masks at its disposal by the end of the year, which will be recycled before the expiry date would have to.
After the expiry date, which usually occurs two to three years after manufacture, the protective effect of FFP2 masks, for example, is no longer guaranteed.
The taxpayers would therefore incur additional costs for the expired goods - for proper disposal.
