2024-03-20 03:32:38
The projects financed from the rural development program for the years 2014 to 2020 did not have specific and measurable goals, criticizes the report issued today by the Supreme Audit Office (NAO). How the support contributed to rural development cannot therefore be evaluated. In addition, according to the auditors, subsidy recipients often provided false information.
In response, the Ministry of Agriculture (MZe) stated that the inspection did not find any errors in the administration, inspections or awarding of contracts from the program. According to the department, the overall impact of the support will be evaluated in 2026.
The SAO focused on state and European Union money paid from the Rural Development Program for the period 2014-2020. He examined selected measures for which a total of CZK 15.7 billion had been paid as of September 2023. The money was mainly intended to support investments by agricultural enterprises and support non-agricultural activities and agritourism.
Did subsidies help rural development? Hard to say yet
The inspection showed that the Ministry of Agriculture did not define the objectives of the program specifically and measurably in order to be able to evaluate the benefits for rural development, states the SAO. According to him, the resort has essentially given up on determining the benefits even at the level of individual projects. “The data required in the subsidy applications and in the monitoring reports are not interconnected, so it is difficult to verify whether the project has achieved the intended goal,” criticizes the SAO.
While the situation was better for the support of agricultural enterprises’ investments, and in five of the seven audited projects it was clear and verifiable how these investments contributed to, for example, higher productivity or animal care, the opposite was true for 13 projects to support non-agricultural activities and agritourism. Not a single SAO evaluated without reservations.
The inspection did not find any irregularities in the administration, inspections or awarding of public contracts for the projects of the Rural Development Program 2014-2020, the Ministry of Agriculture said in response to the SAO report. At the same time, it pointed out that the overall impact of the support will be evaluated in accordance with the applicable legislation only in 2026.
The so-called monitoring reports are to be used to evaluate the project. The SAO found that subsidy recipients often provided incorrect information in them. It detected errors in half of the 20 projects audited, with in some cases the incorrect data being quite obvious.
No penalty for incorrect information
Officials of the State Agricultural Intervention Fund (SZIF) told the SAO inspectors that they did not use the data in any way in their activities. They only checked whether reports were submitted on time. And while the recipient risked a penalty for not delivering the report, there was no penalty for incorrect information, the SAO pointed out.
Not even in one of the audited projects did the SAO find that the beneficiaries spent money on the projects wastefully and in violation of legal regulations, the ministry said. At the same time, it rejected the criticism of the controllers that it did not work with the monitoring reports. “The data collected from subsidy recipients as part of the monitoring reports are further used as one of the sources for monitoring the fulfillment of the program’s overall indicators and are always verified before their use,” says the Ministry of the Interior.
The SAO also considers the fact that the SZIF and the Ministry of the Interior did not notify the law enforcement authorities of facts indicating the commission of a crime by the subsidy applicant in three cases. The resort defends the procedure in this case by saying that neither it nor SZIF came to the conclusion that the circumstances indicate the commission of a crime.