A tangle of excuses, situations and unconvincing explanations have been woven into the Comptroller’s Office to try to justify the expiration of hundreds of budgetary statements for an amount greater than USD 4 billion.
And special exam executed at home to determine responsibilities and times used In the processing of expired files, between January 1, 2019 and November 23, 2023, it exposes several irregularities.
In January 2024, the National Directorate of Responsibilities reported that, during that period, more than 32,000 resolutions were declared void, which ended the entity’s controlling power.
The delays were detected, not in one, but in several instances and departments of the Office of the Comptroller General of the State, as:
- National Directorate for the Predetermination of Responsibilities.
- National Directorate of Responsibilities.
- Management of Administrative and Civil Liabilities
- Secretariat of Responsibilities, responsible for notifying resolutions.
The State Comptroller, Mauricio Torres, had already warned of the series of anomalies he had found since taking office in November 2023, which he described as “barbarities”.
“One (of the cases) that worries us a lot is part of an audit director who approved a report after 180 days. There is reports approved after 800 or 900 days, “That’s outrageous. There are other exams that have expired because they were stored away,” the official revealed to Ecuavisa.
And, every time the Comptroller’s Office investigators ask for information about the faded or expired glossaries, they are told that they were burned in the October 2019 fire, during the indigenous protests.
That was precisely the explanation he gave to the auditors of the Comptroller’s Office the person who served as National Director of Responsibilities, between October 1, 2021 and April 2023.
The National Director of Responsibilities assured that thousands of people were lost in the fire. administrative records, computer equipment and furniture and it took months before they could have a physical space and the equipment to start working.
At the end of August 2024, Comptroller Mauricio Torres reported that he found a series of irregularities in the Comptroller’s Office.FIRST FRUITS.
But, “when the National Directorate of Responsibilities was in the process of gathering information and identifying the impact caused by the October 2019 fire, The National Government, by decree of March 16, 2020, decrees a state of emergency due to the impact on the PANDEMIA COVID 19″the former official added in his excuse.
For his part, someone who acted as acting comptroller (from June 28 to July 5, 2021 and from July 21, 2021 to November 27, 2023) justified itself by saying that it managed the Hiring of 80 technicians for those areas responsible for preventing expiration and which could only obtain 50.
However, “from what was stated, there was no evidence of the actions carried out during the years 2021 and 2022, in order to issue the Guidelines for managing and solving the collection of pending resolutions and avoid their expiration,” the report says.
Failures in the registration system
Another novelty that the special examination found is that the Integrated System of Responsibilities (Sires), which is used, especially, by the National Directorate of Responsibilities, does not have current technical manuals.
And, worse still, “in the tables that store data on resolutions of administrative and civil responsibilities “702 gaps were found in the sequences, i.e. a total of 597,530 missing resolutions,” the internal review says.
Despite the seriousness of the issue, Comptroller Mauricio Torres has announced that the glosses cannot be reactivated and collected, because they are in expiration status.
That’s why most of recommendations of the report It refers to the future organization, coordination and controls that can be applied in the Office of the Comptroller General of the State, so that the glosses do not expire again.
