Court Auditors report: Several ministries involved in financial mismanagement (Part I)

The Algerian Court of Auditors has issued bleak report over public spending in different sector of activities, ministries and official institutions singling out dozens of cases of gross financial mismanagements carried out by the accountants and the ministries who were supposed to oversee the performance budgeting endorsed by the parliament.

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• The Court of Auditor’s observations came in a thorough report over the State’s budget for the first time since more than 20 years, translating thus the Algerian authorities’ resilience to assume a complete transparency and abide by the constitutional laws when dealing with public spending.
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• The document over the State’s budget spending was elaborated on September 29, and endorsed by committee comprising 15 judges from the Court of Auditors including its chairman Abdelkader Ben Maarouf and his deputy.
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• The 138 page report assesses the state’s budgetary expenditures until 2008 and is currently discussed by the financial committee at the Algerian parliament with the ministers.
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• The report has raised several flaws in the management of budgets in various sectors of activities and inconsistencies between the administrative accounts and financial ones. The report has revealed several irregularities from the accountants who deny forwarding their data to the Committee entrusted with overseeing the budgets.
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• This fact has prompted the committee to summon the reluctant accountants to abide by the law, otherwise they will be fined.
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• The report has revealed that the requests sent by the ministries to get their subsidiaries do not obey to any standard and are made at random taking as a reference the previous year’s allocations.
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• This method has a led to dramatic increase of the financial aids allotted to the ministries form one year to another, altering thus already endorsed subsidiaries.
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• For instance, the Youth and Sports’ Ministry has benefitted from 30 projects estimated at nearly 3 billion Algerian Dinars ,but the report has revealed that 5% of the gross total budget has already been spent but not a single project has started yet. 21 other projects date back to 1998 and 2002.
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• The investigations has revealed that among 12 projects which were supposed to be completed by the kick off of the All Africa Games in 2007, 7 didn’t even kick off and 5 others have reached a very low stage.
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