The Supreme Audit Office filed a criminal complaint due to the findings during its inspection of the National Sports Agency. This is according to an announcement on his website. Office spokeswoman Hana Kadečková said that the office already submitted the notification to the Municipal Prosecutor’s Office in Prague on February 22. The review of the controllers showed that the sports agency did not monitor and control the use of subsidies and compliance with the stipulated conditions.
Prague
2:11 p.m May 9, 2024
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The Supreme Audit Office filed a criminal complaint due to findings from the inspection of the National Sports Agency (illustrative photo) | Photo: René Volfík | Source: iROZHLAS.cz
The results of the inspection were published by the Supreme Audit Office (NAO) at the end of April, when it announced in a press release that the Ministry of Education and the National Sports Agency (NSA), which spent 26.5 billion crowns from the state budget to support sports between 2019 and 2022, in some cases did not proceed transparently when providing subsidies.
At the time, the Ministry admitted that in some cases there could have been a partial error in the selection of subsidy recipients. In response, the agency said that its current management is not responsible for the time period under review and that it respects the published results.
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“The National Sports Agency responded to the identified deficiencies already during the inspection by adopting a number of corrective measures, which are continuously implemented in the operational activities of the NSA and the internal control system,” the agency wrote on its website in April.
Now the NSA has said it is currently unaware of the criminal complaint. “At the moment, the National Sports Agency has not officially received information about the content of the criminal complaint, so it cannot comment in any way concretely on its wording and possible further action,” she said on the website.
She added that the most specific finding of the SAO with possible financial damage was the free use of land in Harrachov. “The current management of the NSA has already corrected this, including the payment of the rent due for the audited period within the legal period of three years, the retroactive possibility of financial settlement of the lease relationships,” the office wrote.
‘She did not follow the law’
The National Sports Agency was established in August 2019 and took over the activities previously carried out by the Ministry of Education. The first head of the NSA was Milan Hnilička, who was an MP for the ANO movement from 2017 to January 2021. In May 2021, he was replaced at the head of the agency by Filip Neusser, and at the beginning of December 2022, Ondřej Šebek became the chairman of the NSA.
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The benefit of the establishment of the agency was supposed to be the strengthening of transparency and the introduction of a functional system for evaluating the use of the provided support. According to the SAO, however, the expected benefits “were not fulfilled” and the agency did not evaluate, for example, whether the expenses incurred led to stopping the decline in the physical fitness of children and youth, to stopping the growth of overweight and obesity among children and youth, or to reducing the economic participation of families in sports, which is one of the priorities spent subsidies.
The SAO also revealed deficiencies in the management of the NSA. According to the auditors, for example, she unjustifiably reduced the income from the property by at least half a million crowns when she allowed the original tenants to use part of the downhill and ski jumping area in Harrachov free of charge even after the expiration of the lease contracts.
According to them, it affected six out of 46 plots of land. According to the SAO, the NSA did not have any lease contracts for the remaining 40 plots of land during the audited period, while they were also demonstrably used by other entities. On the NSA land there was, for example, a cable car that is in operation all year round, a hotel and refreshment stalls.
According to the auditors’ conclusion, the agency did not follow the law even when awarding public contracts for the purchase of services and the acquisition of property. “Throughout the audited period, it concluded contracts and orders, paid invoices and paid subsidies without following the legal approval procedures. It did not implement a functional internal control system to ensure economical, efficient and effective performance of the state administration,” the Supreme Audit Office stated in April.
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