Pnrr, the clash on the Court of Auditors – Corriere.it

This text is taken from the Prima Ora newsletter
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Here is the situation, point by point:

• The match in the House.
Today the Montecitorio Hall is discussing the trust placed by the government on the public administration decreewith the amendments that limit the “concomitant controls” of the Court of Auditors on National recovery and resilience plan. Also at the center of the controversy is the decision to extend the so-called tax shield, which would prevent the Court from challenging public officials for damages due to gross negligence, maintaining liability only for willful misconduct or inaction.

• What are concurrent controls?

They are those that would allow the Court of Auditors to verify in itinere, i.e. in progress,
the way Pnrr money is spent
. Introduced by law in 2009, they remained on paper for over a decade, until the Conte 2 government made them operational in July 2020. It was, as explained by the President of the Court of Auditors Guido Carlino, a “compensation” compared to the limitations on liability for gross negligence introduced at the same time, with the justification of the pandemic.

• Controls on the Pnrr

In November 2021, the Court of Auditors established the Board of Concomitant Control to scrutinize the management of Pnrr funds. Since then he has published 48 resolutions, discovering for example the failure to plant 1.7 million trees by the end of 2022 (in some cities only seeds had been planted) and “serious management irregularities” in the project for 40 hydrogen-based refueling stations. At the end of May, the Court reported all the delays in the Pnrr, prompting a reaction from Minister Fitto.

• The government’s position

The executive believes that the concurrent controls hinder the already complicated grounding of the innumerable projects that make up the Pnrr. The decision to suspend them was applauded by Sabino Cassese, the historic signing of the Courier and leading Italian expert in administrative law. Also for the former president of the Constitutional Court Cesare Mirabelli «concomitant control means participation in the administrative activity. And it becomes a co-management». The Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, for her part, underlines that the extension of the tax shield had already been decided by the Draghi government.

• The position of the Court of Auditors

The accounting magistrates yesterday reiterated “the clear opposition” to both the elimination of the concomitant control and the extension of the tax shield. And they announce “every useful initiative to combine speed and legality of administrative action in compliance with national rules and European constraints”. Among the hypotheses, that of raising the question of legitimacy in the Constitutional Court and also that of proposing a conflict between state powers.

• What the opposition say

For the Democratic Party, the management of the Pnrr and the move on controls are “the test of the government’s failure”. For the 5 Stars, “the Meloni government is intolerant of controls”. Carlo Calenda, on the other hand, takes the side of the executive: « The government has done well. Building checks on checks to then paralyze the public administration is one of the many Italian evils».

• Opinions on the “Corriere”

Luigi Ferrarella spoke of « intolerance of controls, of course, but – more and before that – intolerance of any relief, even if only dissonant » on the part of the government, which moreover, he writes, « contradicts the reassuring “so much ex post controls remain”, announcing, for example, that it wants to tame abuse of office, restrict the sphere of trafficking in illicit influences, sterilize the knowledge of judicial news». For Federico Fubini, on the other hand, «a meticulous review of the works by an independent national authority is foreseen by the European regulations and is sacrosanct. Woe to touch her. But keeping the reviewer in the cockpit with the actuator (in so-called “concomitant control”) slows down the process at best and at worst leads to confusion between the latter and the former».

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