The State Audit Office’s review of the compliance of local authorities in tackling corruption has yielded “surprisingly good results”, uncovering just a handful of cases of a high risk of graft, the head of the office said.
Audit office ÁSZ assessed the anti-graft activities of 3,197 local councils and 1,284 local council offices using a new digital system, László Domokos told the online edition of business daily Világgazdaság. The review found risks of corruption at 1,330 local councils, most of which took immediate action to remedy any potential for irregularities, Domokos said. In the end, ÁSZ had to issue warnings to just 202 local authorities, or just over 6% of Hungary’s localities, he added. Some 820 localities had all their operations in order, Domokos said, adding that the local councils had received an average grade of 4.3 on a scale of 1-5. The country’s local councils are increasingly protected against corruption, he said. Domokos said that ÁSZ in the past had reviewed 700-800 organisations a year. “We’re capable of reviewing ten times as many, so we can say that we can assess every organisation using public funds every four years,” he said. Such a broad and active public finance monitoring system is rare even in the European Union, he said.
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