Despite its relevance in budgetary terms, the Evaluation Expenditure of the City makes reports with "no intellectual value" and merely reproduces management data that does not include their own analysis.

This was the Audit of the City’s (AGCBA, for its acronym in Spanish) conclusion after reviewing the work of the unit, which operates under the aegis of the Cabinet of Ministers.

According to the Watchdog, the documents provided by management, even as part of its "primary responsibility" are made "primarily" from numbers of the Integrated Financial Information System (SIGAF), which -in the facts means that the dependence "emits raw information."

Also as its primary responsibility, the Directorate in question must make "ex post" evaluations of major programs and projects of the city government; these analyzes are practiced once the initiatives are already executed. However, the audit noted that "compliance has not been verified" of this mission.

The Name and the Thing

But one doesn’t need to go too far to analyze the management of this dependence. Just stop at their name: Directorate of Evaluation of Expenditures.

In that sense, the AGCBA revealed that it could not learn how the area measures efficiency, effectiveness and economy of spending, "nor was the supporting documentation for this task provided."

Also, worth redundancies, "it has not been determined procedures with regard to the participation of the Directorate General of Evaluation of Expenditure on the Improvement Plan of Expenditure" and the same is true regarding the contribution made by the office Improvement in the Government Plan.

And to complete the picture, the audit says that "there is no regulated procedure in regard to participation (the address) in the process of preparing the annual budget."

A good one; Regardless of whether the watchdog observed that the dependence "has no formal working circuits" it did recognize that "they are developing tasks of progress" of these mechanisms to support the business processes of monitoring the budget execution.

Implicit Strategy

Moreover, the report of the AGCBA approved this year on 2011 data, analyzed the Directorate of Strategic Planning, which also depends on the Cabinet of Ministers of the City.

Regarding this sector, research states that "Procedures Manual has not clearly established the description of activities to be followed in carrying out their duties."

As with Spending Assessment, the Directorate has a primary responsibility; one of them is to create mechanisms with the Strategic Planning Council for various initiatives that make up the so-called "Government Strategic Plan." However, the audit found that this goal was not met, nor were joint tasks performed between these different areas of the State of Buenos Aires.

The central activity of the Directorate in question is to contribute to the development of the Action Plan of the Government but, according to the AGCBA, their participation in the process "is casual and lacking supporting documentation."

"The actions taken by management in regard to the formulation of the Plan of Action of Government and Planning Strategic Plans do not have a regulated process that clearly establishes their participation," the Watchdog said, adding that there is "no record" of these collaborations, preventing measure whether the objectives have achieved dependence.

To help unravel the enigma, the AGCBA said "guidelines are not set nor are there rules to prevent the overlapping of functions between different governments departments," which is another key task of the Directorate.
Mirrors
In the investigation of the audit it was also included observations that are repeated in both directions, the expenditure Assessment and Strategic Planning.

For example, the two offices must advise the Cabinet Ministries of the Buenos Aires their daily efforts, but "are not supported" with mechanisms to standardize these shares.

In addition, both have to contribute their work "to feed the scorecard," which depends on the Undersecretary of Planning and Management Control, establishment of the Cabinet that brings both directorates. However, these tasks "are not established through regulations specifying clearly the objectives and the leaders involved, as well as records that should be generated."
 

Numbers

If budget is concerned, the Audit explained that in 2011 the Evaluation of expenditure had available about $ 876,750 but by redistributing items, that amount dropped 7%, reaching $ 813,026, with a combined of more than $35 thousand as petty cash.

And, by the side of the Directorate of Strategic Planning, the 2011 budget was $905,836. In that case, the budget changes benefited this dependence, since its departure recorded an increase of almost 25%, to $1,131,733, with a petty cash fund of $100 thousand.

Conclusion

"Given the scale of the functions assigned to the directorates, and the relevance of the information to be supplied to the correct decisions, it appears that the processes taking place in both (areas) are lacking formal administrative procedures and approved routes, resulting in the development of their duties being informal and lacking in administrative and documentary support, "the Buenos Aires control body in their research findings said, adding that "such informality, with reports generated with little analysis or processing, are scarce for this AGCBA, as it comes to complex end products, such as the annual Management Plan, unable to identify the circuits and formal contents used."