What are HATVP audits?

From a few hours to forty-eight hours in a row, to avoid casting errors. During the weekend, once validated by Emmanuel Macron, the names of the thirty-eight ministers who will form Barnier’s future government must be transmitted, in complete confidentiality, to the teams of the High Authority for Transparency in Public Life (HATVP).

The mission statement is circumscribed: to verify, before the traditional official proclamation on the steps of the Elysée, that no future minister has problems with the tax authorities or presents a manifest conflict of interest with his future portfolio, or even has a problematic entry in his criminal record. In other words, it is a question of limiting the risk of a future scandal that could be revealed by the press. On Friday, September 20, the HATVP nevertheless declared to the World that “neither confirmed nor denied that the controls had been initiated”the repair process “on a particularly strict principle of confidentiality”.

Created in January 2014 following the Cahuzac affair, revealed by Middle part – The former socialist minister had concealed the existence of an offshore account: the role of the HATVP is to closely monitor the assets and potential conflicts of interest of members of the government, elected officials and senior civil servants after their appointment. If not required by law, the possibility of seizing the HATVP before the appointment of a government has quickly become common practice.

Indeed, if this preliminary check on probity, carried out in a limited time by a very small team, does not constitute control in the sense of the law – but rather “transmission of information”, according to the terms of the HATVP – or even approval of the management of future ministers, it still allows the executive to equip itself with a tight safety net. Emmanuel Macron did not fail to open the HATVP umbrella before validating the governments of Philippe (2017), Castex (2020), Borne (2022) and Attal (2024), as François Hollande had done before him, following the 2016 reshuffle.

Identify risks of conflicts of interest.

In particular, the names kept by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, which according to procedure must be transmitted by the Head of State to the ethics police, must be subjected to a scan before any public announcement. The information held by the HATVP on them (declarations of assets and interests if they are former elected officials or senior civil servants, arrangements made to entrust the management of their financial investments to a third party, etc.), the administration tax (tax situations) or other competent administrations (possible ongoing cases) The information will be carefully analysed, just like any other information published by the press. The idea is not to carry out an exhaustive control – impossible in the time allotted – but, on the one hand, to detect what could prevent certain appointments and, on the other, to identify risks of conflicts of interest.

The work in progress at the HATVP will therefore not differ from that of previous times, except that the list proposed by Michel Barnier is intended to facilitate the task of the teams. Indeed, many future ministers have had elective mandates and have therefore already transmitted to the HATVP, as required by law, declarations of assets (real estate, bank accounts, financial assets, etc.) and interests (paid activities, past or present…).

In fact, if the exercise could have taken on an unprecedented character this year, it is because the president of the HATVP, Didier Migaud, could appear on the list of ministers selected by Michel Barnier, according to Agence France-Presse. This would lead the High Authority to have to carry out checks on its current president.

If the timetable is respected, the discussions that have begun or are about to begin, in particular with the tax authorities, by email and by telephone, should continue over the weekend and until the last hours before the announcement at the Elysée Palace, scheduled for 2018. “before sunday [22 septembre] »According to Matignon, a summary of the work will be submitted to the Elysée and to Matignon, integrating the most important elements of this first analytical work, so that the political decision can be adjusted by confirming their choices or rectifying the situation, eliminating the name of a possible minister or modifying his portfolio. Indeed, custom dictates that, in the event of identified or anticipated difficulties, the High Authority informs the President of the Republic.

A control that is not infallible

However, once this step has been completed, it is only once the members of the government have been officially appointed and installed and their declarations of assets and interests received by the HATVP – that is, no later than two months after their appointment – that it will be possible to begin the real work of in-depth control of the administrative authority, always in coordination with the tax authorities.

History has shown that the controls of the HATVP, which has no real investigative power and must be based on what is revealed, are not infallible. In recent years, the administrative authority has imposed numerous deportation decrees on ministers to prevent their private interests from influencing their public decisions, and has discovered major deficiencies in its in-depth controls, for which it has taken legal action. , real estate assets considered undervalued by the former Minister of Local Authorities Caroline Cayeux, forced to resign in 2022. But other issues have escaped its attention due to the lack of publicly available information. This was in particular the case of the former High Commissioner for Pensions Jean-Paul Delevoye, whose The Parisian revealed in 2019, just three months after entering the government, that he had not declared certain income. Or even the conflict of interest attributed in 2022 by the site Released Agnès Pannier-Runacher was arrested for her family’s ties to the oil company Perenco, which forced the then Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, to order her deportation on this grounds.

In any case, the work carried out by the HATVP represents a considerable advance compared to the recent past. Indeed, while controls were previously unofficial and partial, the 2013 laws on transparency in public life have allowed them to be carried out under the leadership of an authority independent of political power and probity is no longer an ignored value.

This year, as it did for the first time under the Attal government, in order to improve the effectiveness of its action and speed up its controls, the High Authority plans to encourage members of the government, once appointed, to pay particular attention to the prevention of conflicts of interest by submitting their declaration of interests within eight days of their appointment.