Agustín Caso, auditor of the ASF, is dismissed

Mexico City. The special Performance auditor, Agustín Caso Raphael, was dismissed this Tuesday by auditor David Colmenares, a month after he recognized before deputies that the Superior Audit of the Federation (ASF) lowered the 2022 Public Account, the evaluation of the policy educational.

While in circles of the ASF the version is being circulated that Colmenares will replace him with Arely Gómez, former attorney and former head of the Public Service in the six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto, in a public letter, Caso Raphael denounced that the annual audit program “It has become a kind of self-censorship, which does not incorporate issues of national relevance.”

In the 2019 Public Account, Raphael Case calculated the cost of canceling the airport in Texcoco at 331,996 million pesos, but in the face of criticism from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the audit stated that the auditor made an error and gave it on leave and the Evaluation and Control Unit of the ASF opened an investigation, which did not yield any results.

Given this, Caso Raphael was reinstated to his position. Just on March 7, in a working meeting with the Surveillance Commission, he reported that four administrative liability procedures remain open against him for his audit of the work in Texcoco.

That same day, PAN deputy María Elena Pérez Jaén asked the UEC to investigate a “possible obstruction of inspection” by Colmenares Páramo, for hiding audit results in the 2020 Public Account.

This is because in February 2022, the ASF removed 1514DS Educational Policy in Economic Development in Mexico from the annual audit program and when asked by the legislator, Caso Raphael admitted that it was not his decision to omit that investigation.

Both Pérez Jaén and Inés Parra Juárez (Morena) have accused the auditor Colmenares Páramo of obstructing the review of public spending at the federal level and of “rigged use of information, not only from the results of the public account, but from planning of the annual audit program.

Raphael Case announced that it will file “the necessary legal remedies in the face of an arbitrary and illegal decision, because the removal is made without demonstrating that it has incurred any of the causes established in the Law of Supervision and Accountability of the Federation, in its articles 93 and 94”.