The City Council of La Laguna led in 2018 the number of minor contracts -awarded by hand- and the one that most abused the fractionated ones -division into lots-, according to the control report of the Audiencia de Cuentas de Canarias made to the consistories of the Islands. In addition, it was the one that made the largest number of contracts without the mandatory justification of the need and suitability of the object of the contract and the successful bidder. In 2018, the last term of the Canarian Coalition at the head of the Corporation was coming to an end, with José Alberto Díaz as mayor and Candelaria Díaz as councilor for the Treasury.
The audit report of the Audiencia de Cuentas de Canarias on the minor contracts carried out by the municipalities in the 2018 financial year clearly reveals that local corporations have massively failed to comply with the law applicable to minor contracts. And this despite the fact that the information provided for its study by the audited municipalities has been scarcely reliable and complete, according to the opinion.
The City Council of La Laguna heads, ahead of those of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Telde and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the number of minor contracts awarded by the municipalities with respect to the total number of contracts signed, with 1,502, 98.9% of all those who subscribed that year. With regard to installment contracts, those that are concluded after dividing them into lots, La Laguna once again leads the ranking with 44.2% of all those signed.
The Audiencia de Cuentas makes it clear that “the minor contract is of an exceptional nature and its purpose is to enable public administrations to quickly satisfy the needs that, due to their small amount and temporary duration, make it necessary to award them directly.”
And he adds that it is exceptional because “it lacks publicity, which limits the freedom of access to the bidding procedures; restricts free competition and equal treatment; and leads to a lack of transparency that affects the reduction of effectiveness and efficiency in the management of public funds”.
La Laguna also leads the absence of justification of the need and suitability of minor contracts. In 93% of their contracts, what appears is a sentence with the title of the object of the contract or at most a description of what is intended to be acquired, done, or the service that needs to be provided, or the justification provided is generic and lacks the required degree of precision.
Nor is the suitability of the object of the contract precisely justified (in 77.8% of the total sample) and in 93% of those examined in La Laguna.
This circumstance constitutes not only a breach of the Public Sector Procurement Law but also a contract management problem since without the justification of the reason that gives rise to the contract it is not possible to know if there is a need or not, what is the need to cover and if that need can be covered only through minor contracts or through another contracting procedure that facilitates a more effective and efficient use of public resources.
The lack of own means to execute the provision without the need to outsource the service (in 62.3% of the sample) has not been recorded in the service contracts either.
Justification of the procedure
The Canarian town councils do not justify the procedure either, specifying the non-ordinary and urgent nature of the contracting (92.2% of the contracts in the sample compared to 93.9% in the case of La Laguna).
In none of the files examined does the adequacy of the general market price in the determination of the estimated value of the contract appear. And the same happens with respect to a base budget of the tender (by 82.4%).
This supposes a legal breach and is a reflection of an ineffective and inefficient management of public resources, since it implies that there is no minimum verification that the price offered is adjusted to the market.
There has been no record of the justification that the object of the contract is not being altered to avoid the application of the general contracting rules (in 89.8% of those examined in La Laguna).
On the other hand, the approval of the expense does not occur at the appropriate procedural moment in any of the contracts studied in La Laguna and although 81.4% of the contracts in La Laguna are not legally mandatory, the offers that appear are lower than three.
There has been no record of the notification of the award by electronic means in 95.4% of the contracts examined in La Laguna, as provided for by the Public Sector Contracts Law, a relevant fact since minor contracts are perfected with its award.
In 11.6% of them there is no certificate of conformity and/or the certificate received on the invoice, which means, in addition to weaknesses in the internal control system and legal breaches, something that should have prevented the payment of the benefit .
In short, the report highlights that there has been a lack of programming of the contractual activity due to the fact that the contracting file was not processed with due diligence or the development of actions of a necessary, repeated and foreseeable nature, or the performance of benefits of a similar nature that could serve a single purpose.
This has led to the completion of the contract prior to the start of the file and/or the approval of the expenditure in almost 35% of those reviewed in La Laguna. As well as the separate contracting of actions that could have been held jointly. La Laguna leads once again, with 44.2% of its contracts, the subdivisions detected by the Audiencia de Cuentas de Canarias.
