TC, the legitimate paradox between the bar and the stamp.

Just hearing the name of the Court of Auditors is enough to make some legs tremble, as a famous politician absent from the current political scene would say. The Court of Auditors has become, in a way, a Holy Office of public investment, a guardian of European euros, preventing government officials and local authorities from celebrating a goal. Whether this is justified or not, we shall see.

The supreme integrity of the Court of Auditors is not, has never been, and can never be in question; honor be to it, and much has prevented opaque investment by the State and its institutions. However, we cannot fail to mention an apparent double standard, most likely caused by the repeated underinvestment so common in the Justice system of our country.

The Court of Auditors, with merit, legitimacy and (almost always) fairness, has served as a barrier to budget execution, to the point that the legislator, through Law No. 43/2024, has significantly altered the role of the Court of Auditors in overseeing the execution of the Recovery and Resilience Plan, creating a 'facilitation' regime and reducing its suspensive power.

It is almost obscene that, instead of trying to solve the problems at their root, in this case, through contractual debureaucratization, coupled with a courageous reform of the judicial system by hiring new magistrates (among other things), the visa application regime is altered based on mere circumstantial circumstances, which in my opinion distort the very nature of the Court.

The problem is that we no longer even try to disguise our desire to carry out the much-desired messianic judicial reform, in exchange for simple, improvised solutions that will almost inevitably end up on newspaper covers, in headlines, where one will read about the lack of transparency and the possible commission of crimes or illegalities in contracts.

On the other hand, bodies such as local authorities have already given up on opening tenders, knowing that there is a risk of these becoming stagnant, which, as the reader knows, is unthinkable for today's politicians, who prefer the mediocrity of work built today and inaugurated tomorrow; who live off the appearance of work done and not the (substantive) work actually done and, on the other hand, prefer simple direct appointments.

Moreover, the annual Public Procurement report points to an increase in the number of direct awards: in 2024 there were 18% more. The massive use of direct awards is growing exponentially increasing the risk of cronyism and contractual opacity (see European Court of Auditors report 28/2023; Annual Public Procurement Report 2024).

Unfortunately, the tentacles of the Court of Auditors are unable to oversee these cases, notwithstanding the powers legally provided for by the LOPTC (Law on the Organization and Procedure of the Court of Auditors).

Therefore, there is an urgent need to modify the requirements for prior review, establishing a limit, both in amount and in the number of direct adjustments, that a given public legal entity can make. The goal is for direct adjustments to be the exception, not the rule.

The paradigm is precisely this: the Court of Auditors (due to both material and legal incapacity) remains focused on the head of the State, on the highly publicized billions of euros that are scrutinized by politicians and the public themselves, outside the Court's jurisdiction. Often hindering much-needed investments, it fails to prevent, or even oversee, investments made by smaller public entities, where the propensity for irregularities is naturally greater.

The Court of Auditors, which has contributed so much to eliminating illegality and increasing clarity in the allocation of our public funds, needs more. Realistically, the Ministry of Justice needs to truly return to the State Budget: because when paralysis becomes the rule and not the exception, and while the exception of direct contracting gradually becomes the rule, the country loses. The Court of Auditors protects public funds, but the entire system that revolves around it needs to be redesigned, otherwise foreign investment will continue to flee…