Cassese: “The government is right to put limits on the Court of Auditors”

TURIN – “The government did very well to limit the preventive control of the Court of Auditors”. Word of Sabino Cassese, president emeritus of the Constitutional Court, at the Trento Festival of Economics. “There are merit aspects of the controls and methodological aspects of the way in which this affair took place which prove the government completely right and demonstrate that the large state corporations should rethink the way they act towards the state of which they are the representatives,” Cassese explained.

A position that will cause discussion, so much so that Carlo Calenda, leader of Azione, intervenes shortly: “The position that I took yesterday on the Court of Auditors, and which has generated a thousand accusations of ‘collateralism’ with the government, is today, much more authoritatively, also supported by Cassese. I reiterate that we will not give up on being objective”.

From Turin Cassese clarifies what he means. “The whole world culture on controls – explained the president emeritus – says that controls cannot be done sweepingly, but must be done by sample; that they cannot be done on paper, but must be done through in-depth inspections of the activities to be controlled; which must be not of the process but of the product, it is not necessary to check how a thing was done but the result of that action”.

And here, says Cassese, we come to the crucial point: “Preventive and concomitant controls in our country are a form of co-management, the exercise of a power. A division head of a ministry, the president of a public body, whenever he must make a decision, he must call the controller and ask whether he agrees or not. This is called co-management and has two negative effects: it removes responsibility from those who must be held responsible and does not carry out effective checks because with spot checks and not sample checks you don’t go deep”.

Cassese then pointed out that “in the note released to the agencies by the association of magistrates of the Court of Auditors we read that ‘the Court of Auditors asks for a discussion table with the government on the adoption of a law. The discussion table is the’ expression that unions normally use in relation to the state. Can one of the largest bodies of the state use it? If one accepts this type of terminology, one does not end up recognizing that the state has become a kind of aggregation of corporations, of and who therefore has lost all ability to decide?”.