ČTK
Updated 30 minutes ago
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The State Support and Guarantee Fund for Agriculture and Forestry does not closely monitor the contribution of billions of crowns paid in support to farmers. This follows from an inspection, the results of which were published by the Supreme Audit Office. According to the inspectors, the Ministry of Agriculture, which is the founder and sole shareholder of the fund, has set only very general indicators for monitoring the contribution of subsidies to agricultural development.
The fund mainly provides non-repayable financial support to farmers, for example to reduce interest on loans from commercial banks, reduce the principal of loans when buying land or to compensate part of the premium. In addition, he also provides loans himself. The Supreme Audit Office (SAO) examined the support of 6.2 billion crowns paid in the years 2014 to 2018.
“The Ministry has not set suitable indicators for support programs, thanks to which it could monitor whether and how the funds contribute to the development of agriculture. The indicators were very general and did not contain the expected target values that the Ministry of Agriculture wants to achieve,” said SAO spokeswoman Jana Gabrielová.
According to the inspectors, the ministry also approved with great delay documents important for the fund’s activities. For example, the concept setting the fund’s objectives for 2015 was approved only two months before the end of the year.
The evaluation indicators for the members of the fund’s management were also approved by the ministry with a delay compared to its own schedules. People at the head of the fund sometimes performed up to ten months a year without indicators, according to which the amount of their annual remuneration was to be determined.
Financial support has positive effects, the ministry is defending itself
The Ministry in response to the inspection on its the web said that financial support for farmers had positive effects and that the inspection did not show any infringements. “The Supreme Audit Office does not find any violation of generally binding regulations or breach of budgetary discipline after the audit, which took place at the Ministry of Agriculture and the Support and Guarantee Fund for Agriculture and Forestry in the period from July 2019 to April 2020,” the ministry said.
“A number of procedural or formal errors alleged by the SAO of the Ministry were overcome, and in the opinion of the Ministry they did not have a significant influence on the actual exercise of shareholder rights,” the ministry said.
In addition, the very legal form of the fund as a joint stock company makes it difficult to control its operation. The fund, as a private company, concludes support agreements with farmers not on behalf of the state, but on its own behalf, which then makes it impossible to verify the recipients of subsidies. As the fund is a commercial company, the SAO was able to carry out an audit in it only to a limited extent.
According to the auditors, the legal form of the fund does not correspond to the strategy approved by the government, according to which state-owned companies should do business and be financially independent of the state. However, the fund’s activities mainly include support for agriculture, and the decisive source of money for the fund is subsidies from the state budget.
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