The Sindicatura de Comptes (Public Audit Office) in the Balearics has delivered a report to parliament that points to potential fraud on a huge scale in respect of financial aid during the pandemic.
The report warns the government that if it is does not act quickly, thousands of possibly 'irregular' cases will have reached their expiry date under the terms of subsidies handed out and that there will then be no means of demanding the money back.
The Audit Office draws attention to a "total lack of control" in the verification of 865 million euros of aid for businesses. Over 10,500 cases have required review. To date only some 2,000 have been reviewed, the report acknowledging a lack of resources. Of a sample of 723 cases that were reviewed, 371 resulted in aid being returned to the government.
A lack of justification by businesses for receiving aid is the report's main concern, while it also points to the way in which aid was used to compensate debts between different businesses with the same ownership and to different amounts of aid that were requested for each of the establishments operated by the same ownership.
Another point concerns aid requests of 60,000 euros or more. These had to include audit reports confirming that the requests were correct. But some of them, despite having been supposedly audited, presented serious deficiencies.
A further issue highlighted in the report relates to the percentage of aid requests granted by different regional governments. In the Balearics this was 80%; there were 13,253 applications in all. By contrast, for example, the percentage in Valencia, where there was a government with a similar political party composition to that of the Balearics, was 53% (16,278 out of 30,648).
The report thus suggests that the previous government always showed its willingness to provide aid and that this helps to explain deficiencies with regard to internal control mechanisms.
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Morgan WilliamsAlso, I have yet to meet someone who would have preferred to be given or accepted this “aid” than to remain open and continue with business as usual. I understand that part of the deal was to agree to not sack their staff but to furlough them Instead. Maybe some people and businesses profited from this, but I am pretty sure that most of them didn’t. By the way, how did you manage to cope without requesting or requiring an aid package to help pay for the dozens of members of staff that you have led us to believe you have ?
It would depend on what you mean by “government”. The here today, gone tomorrow politicians or the job for life bureaucrats implementing and controlling their wishes ?. It would be interesting to know which cases expire due to a supposed lack of diligence by some faceless office worker, whose salary won’t be affected in the slightest if certain people fail to meet the deadline. It surprises me that you, having lived on Mallorca far longer than I have, have so much faith in the “system”.
You're fishing, Richard. The fact remains, that this is about businesses defrauding the government, not the other way around. I suspect you would have done the same if you had the opportunity, but ironically would blame it on "corruption". "Wasn't me, it was them". Of course.
Morgan WilliamsLook at this way. How many foreign owned businesses received this financial aid compared to locally owned ones. And what percentage of foreign owned ones were turned down compared to locally owned ones? And when I say foreign owned ones I mean not only privately owned ones but also SL companies with a foreigner as the principal administrator. Depending on the results, one could probably asertain that government corruption did occur.
Erm, to his appears to be corruption on the part of businesses - illicitly taking taking aid payments from the government. You can argue that the government should have better vetted these applications, but I'm not seeing how government corruption was involved.
Everybody who is surprised by this report, please raise your hand. Hmmm. Nobody? They (the Mallorca politicians) were just maintaining there old tradition of blaitent corruption. So what's new. They still owe me money.
WildwoodNot shocked but expected as the government couldn't organise a £$%^ up in a brewery.
Wasn’t only in Spain. USA had massive fraud as well via PPP loans. A lot of people took this money and invested it in hard assets, like real estate. Don’t trust the government to allocate money properly.
BerlingoUnlike the UK where politicians were giving multi million pound contracts to their mates.
Wow! And of course no MPs scammed the UK government out of millions on PPE contracts.