The "Informality" Of the Media Secretariat to Distribute State Advertising
According to an AGN report, the agency does not have a specific, time-bound criterion that supports the way the advertising pattern is allocated and distributed, and this may lead to non-compliance with the contracting regime. On the other hand, the execution of the budgets for the financial years 2006 and 2007 was also not planned.
After a work carried out in the Ministry of Media, the National Audit Office (AGN, for its acronym in Spanish) pointed out that "the disparity and lack of specific regulations" regarding the distribution of official advertising "brings the informality of the procedures" to Hiring spaces of diffusion of the acts of government.
According to the report, the first one approved in 2009 - although it was done with data from 2007 -, the advertising contracting procedures are governed by "profuse" rules and are not adjusted to the different instances that intervene in the distribution of the guidelines. These procedures include the "weighting" and eventual approval of the Secretariat for an advertisement request, and the crossing of documentation and invoices with the Telam agency.
On the other hand, in the Ministry of Media "there are no criteria for the evaluation of timeliness, merit or convenience, that allow to objectively determine the provenance or impropriety" in the approval of an advertisement request. That is to say, according to the survey of the AGN, it was not possible to determine which tools the agency uses to approve or reject an advertising order.
Also, no evidence was obtained that there are formal and objective parameters that support the way in which the Ministry of Media distributes and allocates official publicity. The Audit consulted Telam on how to select the means for distribution of the guidelines, and the agency responded: "The rules for the contracting of advertising spaces continue and preserve the plurality of ideas and media. These norms are included within the framework of the Republican obligation to disseminate government acts to citizens and to fulfill the right of citizens to be informed. "Based on this argument, the control agency concluded that, "from the above, there is no evidence of the applied criterion or the rules that support it".
On this issue, the AGN report cites a recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Justice in the lawsuit filed by a Neuquén newspaper against the provincial government for having withdrawn official publicity after the media broadcast a complaint by a deputy of the opposition. The highest court said that "the Federal Government cannot arbitrarily allocate resources for publicity, based on unreasonable criteria," and added: "In order to adopt those decisions in accordance with the principles of freedom of expression, they must be Based on criteria 'substantially related' to the purpose described and which must be neutral in relation to the views of the environment."
The Audit also stated that in the agency that depends on the Office of the Cabinet of Ministers "there is no control by opposition". It is that the same means of communication, in which official publicity is regulated, are those that certify the fulfillment of the diffusion of the acts of government.
Regarding the budget of the Secretariat, the Watchdog said that "strategic planning was not carried out" in the execution of the corresponding items for 2006, $ 177,656,269, and 2007, $ 225,091,643.