“Emergency contracts were the only option.” The government of Juan Manuel Moreno justified this Tuesday the continuation of the system of hand-contracting in the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) throughout the 2021 financial year, for an amount of almost 300 million euros to private companies, ignoring the criterion of their own stakeholders.
The SAS Central Intervention, in an “unfavorable” final report on the control of emergency contracts 2021, blames the Council for having abused the allocations made by hand, without advertising or competition for works, services and purchases of supplies from companies linked to the health sector: 3,669 files that mobilized 296.3 million euros that year. The sample analyzed by the auditors is approximately 126 files, with a budget of 56.6 million, or 19% of the total.
The report, revealed by this newspaper, concludes that the Ministry of Health made “inappropriate” and “without any justification” use of the hand-picked contracts in 2021, taking refuge in the extraordinary legal framework of the pandemic when it had already been repealed, and skipping a dozen articles of the Public Sector Contracts Act. “Significant and repeated inaccuracies have occurred over time,” it says.
This Tuesday, after the weekly meeting of the Government Council, the Minister of the Treasury and spokesperson for the Council, Carolina España, defended these contracts with the same arguments that the General Management of the SAS already uses in its allegations in the provisional report of the Intervention, which have been almost entirely refuted in the final report.
“We have to put ourselves in the present moment. We are talking about 2021. Covid was in a very complicated situation, the important thing in 2021 was to save lives, that is why urgent measures were taken,” assured the advisor.
The report, however, categorically rejects the idea that the pandemic is being used as a pretext by SAS to extend contracts by hand, without publicity or competition throughout 2021, even though in reality the Council continued to do so after receiving the first warnings of the Intervention: at least until the summer of 2023, as this newspaper announced in March of the same year.
The body that oversees the accounts of the Ministry of Health categorically rejects the justification of the 2021 health crisis and the impact it has still had on the response capacity of the administrations. It does so by minimizing the impact of the pandemic at this stage, but above all by emphasizing that the Council made untimely use of the Covid legislation – already repealed – and a forced interpretation of the Public Sector Contracts Act, violating several of your articles.
“The pandemic was already very moderate” in 2021, the report underlines, it was more “predictable” than in 2020 and therefore “they should have already been hired according to the ordinary procedure”. And especially because in May of the same year, the central government had already repealed the exceptional legal framework that it had allowed at the height of the pandemic to accelerate the response of administrations to the health crisis.
The SAS auditors consider that the state of alert at the time no longer responded to an “imperative emergency resulting from events unforeseeable for the project owner and not attributable to it”, the three requirements required by the Public Contracts Act (LCSP) to justify the million dollar rewards without publicity or competition.
“It was necessary to save lives”
The SAS presented allegations on all these criticisms, already included in the interim report of the Intervention of which it was notified on 15 March 2023, but the auditors rejected their arguments, calling them in some cases mere “value judgments”. The Council spokesperson reiterated some of these allegations and also assured something that contradicts the aforementioned report: “We have implemented all the recommendations of the intervention,” Spain said.
However, the work of the auditors also includes the report on the “degree of compliance with the recommendations” that the Intervention sent to the general management of SAS in a previous report, corresponding to the 2020 emergency contracts, and concludes that none of these measures for the correct deficiencies in management have been implemented.
The Intervention criticises the SAS for having responded late and “manifestly out of time” – on 15 May 2023 – with a report on “the degree of implementation of the recommendations” that the supervisory body had made much earlier. The SAS’s response comes “a few days after the expiry of the legal period of six months” since it received the recommendations. “Despite the inopportune nature of its referral”, the Intervention analyses whether they have been respected and decides that all the proposed measures, except one, “are not implemented”.
Asked by this media about the contradiction between the arguments defending the contractual contracts put forward by the Régie and the criticism of these same arguments which appear in the intervention report, the spokesperson advisor replied: “You are very concerned by this report, we were concerned about saving lives, we tried to resolve the problem as best we could, with emergency and emergency contracts, because it was the only option.
From the revelation of elDiario.es to the touch of Intervention
He Sunday March 12 In 2023, elDiario.es exclusively published that the SAS had been awarding million-dollar contracts to private clinics for two years – to refer patients on the waiting list – under the protection of the already repealed legal framework of the pandemic.
The initial file of these contracts – File 110/2021 – is one of those analyzed and severely challenged in the 2021 emergency contracts intervention report.
He Monday March 13 In 2023, this newspaper published a new article: The Andalusian government’s contracts with private clinics reach June 2023 with an expenditure of 243 million. The initial budget for this file was 70 million euros in hand-picked bonuses, but Health has extended these contracts four times for almost two years, with successive additions of expenditure, until reaching 243 million in the summer of 2023.
The SAS then acknowledged having authorized two new extension resolutions at the end of 2022, extending emergency contracts with private health care by two and a half years until then.
He Tuesday March 1424 hours after the publication of the news in this newspaper, the Moreno executive announced the cancellation of the emergency contracts and assured that the SAS would return to ordinary contracts, with publicity and competition, as of June 30, 2023, the date of the last extension of the contracts expired. “The objective is that they do not continue to be extended” [los contratos de emergencia]confirmed Ramón Fernández Pacheco, then spokesman for the Board of Directors, when questioned by journalists after the Government Council.
This same Tuesday, March 14According to SAS sources, the auditor of the Andalusian Health Service sends in writing to the general management “a prior notification to the issuance of the provisional report” on the contractual contracts during the 2021 financial year. This writing is a prior warning to the SAS that it will receive an unfavorable report, which includes non-compliance with the regulations or “particularly relevant qualifications.” It is like a warning signal, which is regulated in article eighteen of the resolution of October 27, 2021 of the general intervention of the Junta de Andalucía.
From there, the SAS is informed of the Intervention’s objections, which finally reach it in the provisional report on contractual contracts 2021, and which is dated June 12, 2023 (even with the emergency contracts with private clinics in force). The SAS presents allegations that are refuted by the Intervention and the tax body reiterates all its criticisms against the abuse of emergency contracts in the final report, which the deputy auditor signs on November 21, but the general management does not receive it until December 14, 2023Ministerial sources confirm this.
From pre-inspection to post-inspection
The Andalusian government defended this Tuesday the system of hand-procurement in 2021, which the PSOE has been denouncing for a year and a half as a “sewer” of irregularities and is threatening to take legal action. Sources from the Moreno Executive recalled that before the Intervention, the Audit Office had published a favorable report on the contracts signed by the SAS.
However, this report deals with the emergency contracts of 2020, the first year of the pandemic, on which there is also a favourable audit of the Intervention, with some notable reservations, namely: that the SAS used a third of its contracts hitchhiking that year to meet pre-pandemic needs, with “faulty planning”.
The Council specifies, beyond the considerations of whether the pandemic was strong or not in 2021, that the Intervention criticizes the SAS for its use of Public Procurement Law. “The inappropriate treatment by emergency procedures in cases in which the impossibility of resorting to other ordinary procedures is not justified or the actions are not limited to the time strictly necessary to resolve the risk situation, has meant [para la Junta de Andalucía] the failure by the management body to verify the conditions of adequacy (articles 65 and 66 LCSP), capacity (article 84 LCSP) and non-competition, prohibitions on contracting (articles 71 to 73), economic and technical solvency (articles 74 to 83), compliance with the tax and social obligations required of any successful bidder,” the document specifies.
On 6 October 2020, the Board of Governors approved an agreement to replace prior control of certain expenditure, bodies and services of the Administration – including SAS contracts – with permanent financial control, in order to gain agility in recruitment.
In other words, seven months after the official declaration of the pandemic, the Council’s intervention has moved from the supervision and a priori authorisation of each expenditure file – before the release of the money – to “an annual compliance audit”, that is, verifying a posteriori that the contracts have been carried out in accordance with the legislation in force and documenting this in a report.
A few weeks ago, the Andalusian Executive authorized a new extension of the use of permanent financial control to other types of administrative expenses, thus relegating the prior inspection. This issue, which depends directly on the Ministry of Finance, was raised today by journalists with the head of this department. That is to say, in view of the damning observation that the Intervention made a posteriori on the contracts signed by the SAS, the permanent financial control should be reconsidered.
Spain replied “I don’t know the problem, I wasn’t in the year 20”, regarding the October 2020 agreement to replace the prior inspection with the permanent control, even if this system was then recently expanded to cover other expenses. and the departments of the Council, already under his mandate. The councilor stressed that a subsequent inspection is an “essential necessity” when it comes to “urgent” contracts.
