MADRID, 9 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –

Vox has called on the Government to carry out an audit of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), its activities and the management of subsidies, given the “accumulation of irregularities” exposed by the Court of Auditors in a report.

Specifically, the Court of Auditors approved in 2019 a report on the official development aid grants managed by the AECID referring to 2016 and concluded that the agency presented “very significant deficiencies and shortcomings” in its control procedures.

The work advises the body to prepare procedure manuals, create a single record of all the subsidies granted to improve their control, exhaustively evaluate their procedures and regularize and purge pending files.

It also calls for regularizing the accounting situation of the collection rights of reimbursement resolutions, doing a strategic planning of subsidies to improve their effectiveness and providing monitoring indicators for some and activities and redefining others, which do not provide relevant information.

In addition, it concludes that neither the regulatory bases nor the calls have included in their evaluation criteria the actions aimed at achieving gender equality on the part of the applicants and that the evaluation commissions themselves did not comply with the balanced presence of women and men.

For all these reasons, Vox has presented a total of eleven proposals for resolutions to the initiative, destined for the Mixed Commission for Relations with the Court of Auditors, in which they also demand that the Government that the AECID develop manuals of procedures for its different management areas, defining the functions and responsibilities of each unit.

In addition, according to Europa Press, those of Santiago Abascal want the AECID to reinforce the internal control mechanisms in the computer systems for the management of subsidies, that the body evaluate in an “exhaustive” way the procedures implemented to comply “rigorously” with the management of these aids and carry out an “adequate” strategic planning that allows for an improvement in the efficiency in meeting the objectives of the aid granted.