Budapest, 1 August 2024, Thursday (MTI) – The State Audit Office of Hungary (SAO) considers the transparency of the financial management of local governments to be extremely important therefore requests them to provide mandatory data.
According to its statement on Thursday, the SAO launched an audit in June with the aim to ensure the security of financial management and to maintain financial balance and solvency during the transition period between local government elections and the formation of new representative bodies.
According to the SAO’s opinion, one of the safeguards for this can be the increase of the transparency of the financial management of local governments. In order to ensure that the most important data on financial management of local governments be available for everyone, the SAO will request the provision of data from all local governments, without exception, at the end of August.
The aim of the SAO is to be able to provide the public with a comprehensive picture of the actual economic situation of local governments as well as the processes of the transition period based on local government data.
The range of data reflecting the handover status on 30 September and to be sent by the end of October covers, among other things, the percentage fulfilment of the total amount of expenditure and the total amount of income of the 2024 budget of local governments, the money supply and credit volume of local governments, changes in local government assets as well as the number and planned overall expenditure of ongoing investments, renovations.
The Vice President of the SAO, Csaba Szomolai, told MTI: the SAO prepares an analysis of the received data and, in order to ensure the transparency of financial management, makes the public data available for everyone in its unchanged form. Factual information about the actual economic situation of individual local governments can be learned from the data.
The Vice President of the SAO considers it important to have a snapshot available for both the public and the local government bodies, which will begin their work in October.
He emphasized that the principle of responsible and regular financial management of funds must be continuously enforced and it is a legitimate demand from every citizen to get a comprehensive picture of the actual financial situation.
Csaba Szomolai added that within the framework of the procedure launched in June, the SAO continuously monitors and analyses the possible risks of local government financial management during the transition period. And also, the effective enforcement of the right to access public data on public interest grounds, can ensure the possibility of public control.