Governments’ failures cost more than BGN 24 bn

Lily Mircheva

The Bulgarian administration has spent inefficiently over BGN 24 bn and more than BGN 950 mln are specifically identified as losses. Such is the financial expression of governments’ failures in the period 1998 - 2009, showed a study of the Institute for Market Economics (IME), made on the basis of audit reports of the National Audit Office (NAO). IME experts even argued that the real amount will be much larger, if cases without data on the expenditures because of no specific and complete information are taken under consideration.

There are unaudited programmes, projects, budgets or there are examined objects whose audit reports are not published. "The main conclusions of the study are that there is great carelessness in terms of fund spending and that the administration is working inefficiently. In some programmes even minimal results were not achieved, which rises the question whether the administration should deal with these activities, "said for Klassa Svetla Kostadinova, Director of IME. She believes that if these funds were given to businesses and citizens, the effect, surely, would be more positive. "The administration pressed people in the private sector and made them think they have to rely more on the State rather to trying to address their problems by themselves," said Georgieva.

The authors of the study have analysed a total of 586 audit reports and have classified them as successful or failed. The audits whose performance and results are controversial are considered as "unclassified." Their number is 206 but their total value amounted to BGN 17 bn. The IME Director explained that the information contained in those reports, was not specific and there was no evidence whether the programmes had been successful or not. According to Kostadinova, previously, NAO had more limited powers but, now, after the introduction of the new law, the competences of the institution to investigate and evaluate have been enhanced. However, she noted that there were mistakes in parts of the reports.

The final results of the study reported a total of 142 successful cases amounting to BGN 22 bn. This means that, in financial terms, the failures exceed success by over BGN 2 bn.

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