There are reforms that present themselves as administrative modernization, but which, when seen up close, seem less like an update of the State and more like a lifting of its protective barriers. The Government’s proposal to relax public procurement oversight belongs to that uncomfortable category of reforms that promise efficiency while reducing scrutiny.
The official argument of accelerating decisions, reducing bureaucracy and freeing up investment is simple and seductive. To this end, we opted for the ease of eliminating prior inspection by the Court of Auditors in more than 90% of public contracts. At first glance, it seems reasonable.
The problem begins when speed is confused with good governance, because in a country where public procurement presents levels of irregularity exceeding 40% in prior inspection and close to 67% in special prior inspection, removing one of the main preventive control mechanisms is not a mere procedural change, it is a political choice of enormous scope.
It is important to dismantle the myth that the prior visa paralyzes the State, as the real average decision by the Court of Auditors is between nine and twelve days, and the vast majority of contracts are analyzed in less than a week. Only the most complex cases extend over longer periods, precisely those where delay is often a sign that there is something that deserves to be scrutinized.
The Government insists that control does not disappear, it just stops being prior and external to become internal, a posteriori and certified by the General Inspectorate of Finance. But who supervises who?
When scrutiny ceases to be exercised by an independent entity and depends on internal mechanisms of the contracting entities themselves, it opens up space not only for error, but for capture. Because the real problem with public procurement rarely lies in gross illegality, it lies rather in the vast gray area where interests discreetly align, priorities adjust behind the scenes and million-dollar decisions are shaped before any official signature.
Added to this change is the limitation of the financial responsibility of public managers to cases of intent or serious negligence. In theory, the aim is to free the administration from the fear of making decisions, but in practice, there is a risk of institutionalizing irresponsibility, as between honest error and serious negligence there is a vast intermediate zone where many bad public decisions fit. If only serious guilt is sanctionable, who will define where recklessness ends and gravity begins? How many ruinous decisions will simply stop generating consequences because they do not reach this new threshold?
The model that emerges is simple to describe. Decisions are made faster, there is less oversight and almost never accountability. The idea of replacing the prior visa with subsequent audits comes up against the material reality of the Court of Auditors itself. The court does not have sufficient magistrates, auditors or operational structure to compensate for this change with effective concomitant supervision. Even with the reduction of processes, the resources released will be marginal in a system already stretched to the limit.
When the Court questioned the absence of adequate seismic demands in a large hospital in Lisbon, it did not do so on a bureaucratic whim. It did so because it identified obvious signs that additional charges and extra-contractual work could arise after award, significantly inflating the final cost of the work. Instead of correcting specific excesses, the Government chooses to amputate almost the entire control mechanism, as if “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” was a reform strategy.
If there were a robust counterpart in active transparency, the equation might be different. But this dimension remains absent, as there is no serious proposal for effective public transparency in State contracting. Open platforms with mandatory publication of contracts, addenda, payments, financial execution, risk indicators or alert systems accessible to citizens, journalists and civil society are not announced.
There is only an obligation to communicate contracts worth more than R$950 thousand to the Court of Auditors. But communicating is not scrutinizing, notifying is not transparency and archiving is not opening. Without public data, real-time traceability and effective civic scrutiny, the transparency invoked by the Government is nothing more than administrative rhetoric and laziness in doing the right things.
The question is not whether the State should be faster, the question is whether it can afford to be less transparent. A modern State is not one that monitors less, it is one that decides quickly because it is transparent, because it is auditable, because every euro spent can be tracked and scrutinized by any citizen.
Without this, the end of the prior visa will not be a modernizing reform, it will simply be the opening of a highway towards the lack of accountability in public management, towards clientelism and towards more sophisticated and silent forms of corruption and State capture.
Meanwhile, the Minister of State Reform should look at what is happening in his own home, as he maintains micro-bureaucratic control, which comes from the days of the Troika, which requires a prior opinion from ARTE, in technological acquisitions worth more than 10 thousand euros, without being able to share a public observatory or contribute to a technological architecture of reference for the entire State.
The prior visa may be (but is not) a Portuguese singularity, however, we should also be ashamed of our opacity. In the digital era, with political will and some technical competence, it is possible to put an end to the “bad bureaucracy” that attracts suspicious behavior and at the same time preserve and accelerate “good bureaucracy”, with rigor and transparency, capable of guaranteeing the public interest and the good reputation of institutions.
Leave a Reply