Social Development Hired a Company for $286,000 Dollars without Performing the Necessary Groundwork
<p style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">It was an agreement between the Ministry and the company Uunet Technologies to develop a website where information on social investment funds in Latin America and the Caribbean. A report by the AGN indicates that the project remained dormant for two years and doesn’t have institutional responsibility.</span></p> <div> </div>
The Ministry of Social Development received $311,000 thousand dollars to develop an Internet-based program that remained dormant for two years and at the time of the review by the Auditor General's Office (AGN, for its acronym in Spanish) had no institutional leaders to take charge of maintenance or criteria for hiring the consultant who developed the website.
This is the page InterRed currently online, which was created for the exchange of experiences in social policy between Latin America and the Caribbean. This site, which groups the Social Investment Fund (FIS) of the region, aims to generate progress on programs to alleviate poverty from the international cooperation.
Argentina received in 1996 $311,000 thousand dollars of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (BIRF) to develop the project. Of this amount, 8.04% was used for workshops, seminars, and meetings. And the remaining 91.96% was spent on "consultants," says the AGN, referring to the hiring of the company Uunet Technologies Inc. Although the participation of the firm represented the largest percentage of the project, the watchdog concludes that "there was no criteria to substantiate" an agreement by which $286,010 were paid.
The watchdog, which this year adopted its report on data from 2007, made a tour of the site and verified that "recent published technical papers dated back to 2005."
According to the study, those responsible for the maintenance of the website were not found and “up to the approval date, no answers had been received” to the question that were asked by the Audit.
Finally, the AGN suggested the need for "institutional responsibility and maintenance of the website", "clearly indicating its current administrator" and recommended that "if they maintain in effect the objectives of its creation, the site web requires (one) update."