Highway maintenance companies were poorly monitored by road workers, the audit found

Last July, the road workers in Olomouc ordered cleaning around the main road number 35. The job description only said: “Drainage – cleaning of deposits – machine shop.”

After a few months, when the inspectors of the Directorate of Roads and Highways (ŘSD) checked what exactly the hired external company was paid for, they did not find out. In the documents for the contract, they did not find what machine the company used for cleaning, how many hours it was in operation and in which section of the road it worked.

At the same time, the state ŘSD has a computer system for exactly these things, into which it is possible to enter all the information that is important for ensuring that the work was done and, moreover, in the ordered quality.

But as a recent audit showed, road workers did not use the so-called Central Fault System in some regions at all, or only to a very limited extent.

It came about thanks to a case that Seznam Zprávy described in detail on Wednesday: The Directorate of Roads and Highways last year terminated contracts worth 326 million to the companies Silverton and Mark Morava, which were responsible for the maintenance of highways and 1st class roads in the Central Bohemia region. The inspection according to the ŘSD raised suspicions that the companies may have cheated on the work – according to the inspectors, they entered duplicate photos into the defects system, indicating that they had completed the work.

“With one photo, they proved that they had collected garbage from, for example, three roads,” described one of the examples, the general director of the ŘSD Radek Mátl.

Although there is no hard evidence, the audit found it possible that the state was paying millions for work that was never done. Which in the volume of the four-year contract could mean big losses in the final.

In addition, another audit revealed that in some regions, road workers do not use a system called the Central Evidence of Vade (CEV). Or only partially.

“Inconsistent contractual conditions across the ŘSD departments for orders for routine maintenance, including the largely missing use of the CEV system,” is the conclusion of the audit, which the ŘSD management received at the end of last year and which was obtained by Seznam Zprávy.

At the end of the document, there is a clear recommendation: “Set uniform conditions throughout the organization.”

The auditors actually found out that the state organization ŘSD, managing 79 billion crowns, does not have a perfect overview of whether companies hired for so-called routine maintenance – i.e. trimming greenery, cleaning, cleaning traffic signs and the like – are not being paid for something they did not do. It seems like small activities, but in each region the ŘSD spends hundreds of millions for them in four-year contracts.

The director of ŘSD Mátl admits that his organization does not use the system perfectly. “Somewhere it is less, somewhere more. Now we are unifying it,” admitted Mátl. He added that in all regions, the system will be compulsorily “fed” with data from April 1.

It was in central Bohemia, however, that road workers put everything they had into the system – companies also recorded the above-mentioned photographs from the field there. And thanks to this, the alleged irregularities were discovered. The “alleged” is important: The companies unequivocally deny that they did anything wrong. They object that the ŘSD took over all the work from them last year without reservations or complaints.

“We vehemently reject any assumptions that we cheat jobs or otherwise attempt any fraud,” Silverton and Morava Brands said in a joint statement to Seznam Zprávy.

Both companies have also rejected the official termination of the contract, claiming that their contract with ŘSD continues legally. It is therefore possible that the dispute will end up in court. The companies also say that the errors described in the audit (i.e. duplicate photos and incompletely reported work) were able to be explained by ŘSD.

“We refuted any suspicions regarding the alleged fraud, which we substantiated with the relevant documents, especially photos, video recordings, handover protocols and construction diaries,” said representatives of the companies.

ŘSD is now finalizing a new contract for maintenance in Central Bohemia. At the same time, according to director Mátl, he will introduce a new function of so-called sheriffs – a kind of mobile patrols that will be able to appear at any time at the place where the ordered company is supposed to work.