Inactive pensions in Slovakia were alerted by European auditors three years ago

BRATISLAVA. « Let’s say it completely – I have not found such fraud in eleven years in Europe or outside of Europe, » said Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský for SME.

In Slovakia, Zdechovský led a mission of MEPs from the Budget Control Committee and was interested in the pension case. As the media reported, thanks to PPA subsidies, some applicants have built private hacusses instead of pensions.

Although Slovakia now looks like a lone guilty, other states have similar experience with this challenge.

In 2020 performed in Slovakia and in the next 10 countries of the Union’s control of the European Court of Auditors. He focused on « investments in diversification », ie what we know in Slovakia today as a « guesthous challenge ».

The aim of the call was to extend the business of farmers, as employment is declining in the countryside.

The audit focused on 879 projects. The auditors wondered whether the pensions for which subsidies were paid from 2014 to 2015 were also operated in 2020.

They checked online sources, but they also tried to book accommodation by phone or e-mail in the pensions. It turned out that 23 percent of the accommodation facilities in Slovakia did not work.

Of the 11 controlled states, Slovakia was the third worst. The higher percentage of inactive guest houses were only in Hungary (33 percent) and Romania (27 percent).

The final report auditors write that in some countries accommodation facilities were also used for private purposes, but do not name which states were.

For example Bulgarian The authorities found that three quarters of the subsidy applicants did not fulfill their business plans and therefore recovered from them to return a total of EUR 21 million. In the next period, Bulgaria, unlike Slovakia, has stopped supporting the pensions.

Overall, the auditors assessed that the guestion challenges do not work well and have little impact on the expansion of the business of agricultural enterprises.

On Wednesday the same was spoken by the Slovak MEP PS Michal Wiezik. « It turns out that the challenge itself was inherently set up and created gaps that were used fraudulently, » he said.

In the future, the European Commission wants to further release the rules for Member States. Wiezik is afraid of this and, according to him, the example of the Slovak Pension challenge shows that this cannot also mean deregulation of control.

What did other audits have been saying

Minister of Agriculture Richard Takáč of Direction is trying to downplay the pension case. It says, for example, that the European Commission has been approved by the call, or that it has been audited several times between 2020 and 2023. It also refers to an audit to be done by the then Minister of Agriculture for OĽaNO Ján Mičovský.

« After the inspections, these projects were paid, so they probably didn’t find anything there, » the minister said.

However, according to a partner agreement, the European Commission does not approve individual challenges, but only the program as a whole. Calls are approved by the Central Coordination Authority. In 2015 it was the Government Office, later the Ministry of Investment.

As the daily SME wrote, later problems with abuse of subsidies could have originated in the less strict setting of the guest challenge.

As far as audits are concerned, we found their overview in the annual reports of the Agricultural Paying Agency. For example, only in 2020, the European Commission launched six different audits in the Agency, the next year three. Some were more general, some specifically focused.

However, the results of the audits are not public, so it is not known whether and to what extent they have also been devoted to the 2015 pension call.

Takáč also mentions the so -called. Forensic audit, which was made by Mičovský in 2020 and 2021. It focuses on detecting fraud or corruption.

The audit was done by an external PWC company. While Takáč says that this audit also concerned the guesthous challenge, Mičovský does not know how to confirm it.

Even if Takac was telling the truth, the results of the audit were not flattering. The audit company chose 110 suspicious cases and in nearly 60 percent of them found various corruption suspicions.

These were, for example, unreasonably high remuneration for consultants (more than 25 percent of the amount of the subsidy), special -purpose changes in projects scoring, the conflict of PPA employees’ interests, or changes in the rules of already published challenges.

Minister for OĽaNO Samuel Vlčan In 2022, the audit was handed over to the Special Prosecutor’s Office, which was then canceled by Fico’s government.

The amount of inspections in the PPA was also made by the Supreme Audit Office, but according to the Office spokeswoman, no pension calls of 2015 were concerned.

The projects are evaluated by the receptionist

When a cattler’s case broke out in 2020, Minister Mičovský also responded by suspending PPA accreditation.

At that time, audits revealed various shortcomings in the agency processes that began to be repaired gradually. Accreditation was renewed in a year, but this was not enough for the European Commission.

Meanwhile, it started to reduce payments for farmers to Slovakia. At first by 10 percent, then by 25 percent. In practice, this meant that some subsidies were delayed, and the state paid them from its budget. The reduction of payments was not stopped until 2023.

As he showed Last audit of the Supreme Audit Office Published in March, the Office still does not consider PPA control mechanisms to be sufficiently effective. Although the system looks on paper to meet the accreditation criteria of the European Commission, it encounters its limits in practice.

The Office sees, for example, personnel weaknesses. There is a large fluctuation of employees in the agency, the criteria for new employees are low, and they are also poorly trained. The projects are also evaluated, for example, by a receptionist without training and practice.

There is also a lack of automatic assignment of controllers or mechanisms that would prevent the conflict of interest.

The SAO also criticizes weak morality in the agency that tolerates corruption.

« If you have 720 employees and adopted a culture of corruption 50, 100 or 150, you can hardly change this environment from year to year or through one person, » said SAO chairman and former SDL vice -chairman Ľubomír Andrássy after an audit in an interview For Aktuality.sk.