Hard international assessment on the quality of management of the Argentine government’s “COVID expenditure”

The management of funds spent by the Argentine government to deal with the COVID-19 emergency leaves a lot to be desired, according to an international report released in Washington, United States., for him “International fiscal partnershipWhich looked at how 120 countries around the world made available and administered a total of $ 14 trillion (millions of millions) of dollars with which they responded to the problem.

For the Argentine case, Ihe IBP has taken a look at Federal Emergency Income (IFE) and ATP Work and Production Assistance programs). The result is lapidary. According to the study, the Argentine government was biased in terms of information on aid plans, the level of vigilance on the use of funds was “minimal”, the transparency with which they were made available was “minimal” and the liability was “limited.”

Some conclusions

Out of 120 countries studied, the main finding of our research is that governments are failing to manage their fiscal policy response to the crisis in a transparent and accountable manner. More than two-thirds of the governments we analyzed, in many regions and income levels, exhibited only limited or minimal levels of responsibility in introducing and implementing their first fiscal policy responses ”, indicates one of the conclusions of the report.

Taking into account the information provided, the level of vigilance and transparency in the use of funds and the quality of accountability, The report placed the 120 countries surveyed on a scale of 5 levels of COVID fund management quality: Substantial, Adequate, Some, Limited and Minimal.

No country received a “substantial” rating and only 4 received a “adequate” management quality rating: Australia, the Philippines, Norway and Peru. Another 29 countries, mostly “developed”, were classified as intermediate quality or “certain” control. There are several European countries, the United States and Japan, but also emerging or less developed countries such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

In the penultimate stage, of “limited” quality of management and responsibility, Argentina appears with 54 other countries, including China and Russia, mostly underdeveloped countries in Africa (Angola, Botswana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Uganda), Asia (Afghanistan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan) and Latin America (Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua) as well as some developed countries, such as Spain and South Korea.

In the last stage, with “minimal” quality, there are 32 countries, from Albania and Saudi Arabia (a kingdom tightly controlled by a dynasty) to Venezuela, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

It is essential that governments be accountable for how they are implementing their assistance, as failure to do so hampers efforts to hold governments accountable for the effectiveness of their response to the crisis.

However, it should be taken into account that Argentina obtains the lowest score in two of the four aspects assessed: “minimum” information and vigilance on assistance plans.

To assess the Argentine case, The IBP chose the IFE and the ATP as the two most important programs in terms of impact on public expenditure, to the point that the IFE, specified, represented three quarters of social expenditure and the ATP almost two-thirds of aid spending. private sector, and together they represented 51% of the amounts distributed with budgetary impact.

According to the report, it is essential in the first place that governments communicate how they are implementing their aid, because failure to do so “hampers efforts to hold governments accountable for the effectiveness of their response to the crisis. “. According to the report, about half of the governments surveyed published little or no information on actual spending, funding and performance compared to what was expected, very few ensured access to adequate levels of information , and transparency was “particularly weak when communicating information on the impact of policies on different categories of beneficiaries”.

In addition, Almost two-thirds of the 120 countries gave “very limited information on the introduction and use of simplified procurement procedures related to the pandemic”, making it difficult to assess value for money when l ” purchase of medical equipment or other goods and services. Worse yet, only one in four countries have written and published audit reports in a timely manner, to truly verify how COVID spending has been used.

As examples of good practice, the report cites the cases of Australia and Bangladesh, which “have published detailed reports detailing the implementation of specific policy measures and their impact on various disadvantaged groups, including women, the elderly. , children and those living in poverty. . Another example was a US “pandemic surveillance” website, including a “money tracking” tab, with lots of disaggregated information on response programs. As , Peru was highlighted by a joint government-civil society working group, “Mesa de Concertación para la Lucha contra la Pobreza (MCLCP)”, which released a report analyzing the impact of the government’s response to COVID on various groups, as well as an open data portal in which the Peruvian government continuously updates the progress of the implementation of the programs.

Update, audit, involve Congress and “save receipts”

Responding in an open and responsible manner is not only a way for governments to show that they care about the plight of their citizens, but also to reap some of the benefits of tax openness, from reducing the risk of corruption to the guarantee of more equitable and efficient results, ”wrote the authors of the report. Transparency and accountability mechanisms, they added, are essential “To ensure that the massive resources that are mobilized are not wasted”.

The report makes 5 explicit recommendations in this regard ”.

1- Publish monthly progress reports on the implementation policy (or regularly update implementation information on web portals), including data and analysis on budget execution and performance, disaggregated by impact on disadvantaged groups, including women and girls.

2- Reveal all the details related to supply contracts related to emergency expenses, to the extent possible in open formats.

3 – Provide resources to Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) to conduct expedited audits on emergency spending programs and ensure that governments take corrective action in response to audit findings.

4 – Restore the role of legislators as custodians of public funds, including approval of expenditures, public and stakeholder consultation, monitoring of policy implementation, and following up on audit findings.

5- Put in place adequate mechanisms for citizen participation in the formulation, approval and execution of additional emergency fiscal policy programs. These can be mechanisms used by the executive, the legislature and the oversight bodies.

Finally, the report recalls the request that the IMF, pushed by anti-corruption activists, made, in the voice of its director, Kristalina Georgieva, to its 198 members: “Do whatever it takes, but keep the receipts.”

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