Only 28% of compliance has so far the recommendations of the Commission’s Public Expenditure on the transparency of fiscal funds related to the Covid-19 crisis, according to the monitoring report of the Fiscal Observatory.
The entity ispidary in concluding that little progress has been made in terms of transparency of public silvers executed in the midst of the health emergency.
“Chile is behind in this area and spending related to the health emergency has many more risks because there are more reallocations, there are more direct deals and spending is executed faster,” the foundation’s director, Jeannette von Wolfersdorff, states in statements to the newspaper La Segunda.
Von Wolfersdorff explained, for example, that from public purchases related to the health crisis, there is no information available because these are done very quickly. “We see that there are multiple ways to identify crisis-related purchases, but they are not identified as such, standardization is lacking,” he said.
Therefore, the call is to the Ministry of Finance to accelerate the implementation of its commitment in tax matters. “We need more incentives and transparency to keep funds from being lost,” he said.
Disseminated information
The report in question showed that as of June 30, there is a 33 per cent advance in transparency of covid-19-related public expenditure data, and 27 per cent in transparency of expenditure data in the Emergency Economic Plan.
There is also 50 per cent transparency in total resources and funding sources for the measures applied, and no progress in transparency of data associated with public procurement by the covid-19 pandemic.
Von Wolfersdorff explained that “to do this monitoring, we had to review different sources. There should be a page related only to these funds (…) today we see that the Council for Transparency has a website with data that does not match the Treasury.”
According to the report of the Fiscal Observatory, the compliance figure is “still low given the urgency in the country, and the need to adequately monitor the good use of public resources”, so it is essential to “advance the transparency of public spending associated with the Covid-19 emergency, based on high international standards, and by privileging criteria of opportunity , quality and reliability of published information, at the lowest possible cost to public institutionality.”
