Ministry of Agriculture failed to organize transparent competition for research projects
Press Release – December 9, 2013
The Supreme Audit Office (SAO) scrutinized subsidies earmarked for applied agricultural research projects. The ministry of Agriculture spent CZK 1,200 million on the projects during the period 2010–2012. Auditors selected 23 individual projects, which cost CZK 98 million and should have been applied in practice. The SAO concluded that practical applicability of all audited projects could not be ascertained.
The SAO criticized the Ministry of Agriculture that transparent competition had not been organized for projects’ selection. Members of the expert commissions that were responsible for projects’ selection sometimes included authors of the evaluated projects who surprisingly (!) succeeded in the tenders in the end.
The SAO warns about the risks involved in project assessment that was performed by the authors of projects, as well as about the poor supervision of the assessment processes, which was the Ministry responsible for. Possible benefits of projects were estimated according to the number of farmers who could use the outcomes in practice. These estimates were made by the projects’ authors and were not based on provable facts. Authors enumerated the benefits of projects that would cost millions of CZK to tens of milliards but nobody could verify the achieved benefits in reality.
The outcomes were mostly published as annotation lists referring to articles and lectures. The Ministry only formally supervised the references: sometimes there are references in the list, which only loosely correspond with the project’s subject matter. For example, the index list of a project aimed at the Czech carp and its biological potentiality listed articles about nutrition of the catfish (Silurus glanis) or about fatty acids in the perch (Perca fluviatilis).
Among the audited projects was one entitled “Drinkability of beers and the method applied for its assessment”, which received a five-year grant in the amount of CZK 13 million. After two years, the Ministry ceased to support the project. In the end, the beneficiary got CZK 5 million for the accomplishment, which only included elaboration of the assessment methodology and a reviewed paper on the subject that was published in an expert journal.
For further details about auditing operation No. 13/08 (in Czech only), see the following link: http://www.nku.cz/assets/media/informace-13-08.pdf.
Communication Department
Supreme Audit Office