Auditing operation No. 03/23
Management of the state property by the State Fund for Transport Infrastructure
The auditing operation was included in the Annual Audit Plan of the Supreme Audit Office (hereinafter referred to as “SAO”) for the year 2003 under No. 03/23. The auditing operation was managed and audit conclusion drawn up by Mr. Jiří Adámek, the Member of the SAO.
The aim of the audit was to examine the management of the State Fund for Transport Infrastructure with the state property and ensurance of the efficient use of funds for selected purposes.
The auditing operation covered period from 2001 until the end of the audit.
The audited bodies were the Ministry of Transport (hereinafter referred to as “MT”), the State Fund for Transport Infrastructure (hereinafter referred to as “SFTI”) and eight beneficiaries receiving subsidies from the SFTI. The SFTI had during the audited period revenues on the whole CZK 124,443 million. These funds were not always used efficiently, economically and effectively by the SFTI:
- As at 31.12.2003, CZK 14,973 million remained without effective usage, which represents 12% of the stated income of the SFTI. An amount of CZK 8,778 million of this was accounted for by recipients that were unable to use the provided funds, in particular the Road and Motorway Directorate (RSD) . The remaining CZK 6,195 million was accounted for by the creation of unspecified reserves, of which the overestimate of assumed outgoings stood at CZK 831 million.
- Managerial and organisational measures do not fully provide for the economic and effective use of the funds expended on transport infrastructure programmes. The programmes have not become an effective tool for influencing the activities of the development, construction and modernisation of transport infrastructure in connection with priorities and financial ability. The ascertained deficiencies influenced negatively the efficiency of drawing funds from the SFTI as an important source of financing of programmes. In particular:
- The MT did not set the financial requirements of programmes on the basis of actual sources of their coverage and the anticipated coverage of these requirements from the SFTI in the coming years is not convincingly resolved;
- The MT did not monitor and evaluate, on an ongoing basis, fulfilment of the aims and objectives of programmes, it has clearly not set out the responsibility of the MT and the STFI for the selection of projects for implementation within the framework of programmes, the MT left responsibility for the implementation of programmes registered in ISPROFOND to the STFI;
- The selection of projects for implementation from the requests of investors, which considerably exceed the capacity for financing, was not subordinated to the priorities arising from the programmes and the MT did not set any priorities with respect to the actual needs and financing capacity;
- The system of selecting projects for implementation from the budget of the SFTI did not ensure the exclusion of projects that were insufficiently prepared, which was negatively reflected in the low rate of utilisation of released funds by recipients;
- From available documentation at the MT and the SFTI it is not possible to objectively verify whether the projects selected for implementation were those with the highest social-economic impact.
- The process of selecting applications for the provision of contributions was not, in many cases, transparent or objective. As in the case of programmes, the exclusion of projects that were not properly prepared was not ensured.
- There was not fully secured the adherence to the declared purposes, for which were contributed the financial means to the SFDI according to the application for contribution. Deficiencies were ascertained in five out of the eleven audited projects.