Controls on television programming by the Federal Broadcasting Committee (COMFER, for its acronym in Spanish) are "quantitatively insufficient," says a study by the National Audit Office (AGN, for its acronym in Spanish). Throughout the national territory, 715,473,000 TV hours per year are broadcast, between open and cable channels. The same committee informed the control body that between 2004 and 2005 it monitored 0.017% of the hours transmitted, that is, slightly more than half a second for every sixty minutes of contents.
 
The AGN found that the work of COMFER "tends not to be universal," that means, it does not control all TV channels. In fact, there are licensees who are "exempt from controls" because the agency operates exclusively in the locations where it has a delegation installed and only checks the transmissions that are tuned from that place. In Argentina there are 1,361 cable TV licensees that emit more than 700 million hours per year. Of this total, the Committee audits 62 signals and leaves more than 95% of channels out of its analysis.


In the case of open television, COMFER registers higher percentages of supervision but only in the area of ​​the Federal Capital, where there are five air channels with 17,520 hours of transmission. The agency reported that in 2004 it inspected 91.3% of Buenos Aires' programs, while in the following year it reached 81.5%. On the other hand, these percentages decrease when taken to the rest of the national territory: the 43 open signals of the country emit 131,400 hours of programming, of which COMFER analyzed just over 7,200 (6.4%).
 
The audit report, which was approved in July 2008 - despite having been carried out in 2006 with data from the 2004-2005 period - indicates that the material resources of COMFER are "scarce and inadequate to carry out the control contemplated in the Normative ", and points out that in the 33 delegations of the Committee there are a total of 85 televisions and 47 video recorders, of which more than half are in a regular or bad state.
 
Apart from these figures, the agency also has no "strategic planning to monitor the content of emissions," says the AGN and adds that this failure causes COMFER to be "prevented from carrying out its control activity on the basis of objective criteria and measurable." In short, those working on the Committee do not know how they have to monitor the transmissions. The COMFER acknowledged that "there is no act of resolution that approves a National Plan of Control because, since the validity of the current legislation (sic), it has not been considered necessary to issue a standard (sic) in this regard." The tool used by the agency is a "monthly monitoring schedule", which, however, is not approved by its highest authority and is based, as the Committee itself clarified, on a "common sense" criterion and on "experience Accumulated ". The Audit noted that "the design of the control parts implemented -informally- by COMFER, is insufficient for the purposes of control," because it does not establish what type of violation to the Broadcasting Law is intended to detect. Therefore, the AGN concludes, "the monitoring agent merely describes aspects of an issue and will only record an observation if it understands that there is an infringement - according to its accumulated experience and common sense", whereas, if it did not detect No transgression, "nothing will be observed and it will not be possible to determine even what type of fault was being scrutinized".
 
For the Audit, COMFER's collection of fines was "unsatisfactory", because "it was not promoted speedily in the income of resources for (the) infractions". Between 2004 and 2005, the sanctions applied by the Committee amounted to $ 1,568,949, although only $ 12,997.50 was received. Likewise, the control body verified that "all infringements due to excessive advertising are detained in technical areas or in archives", and were not resolved despite having "exceeded legal deadlines." The team of auditors took a sample of the files and found that, on average, "more than 800 days had elapsed from the time of the infraction to the analysis of the AGN, without any resolution."
 
On the other hand, the Audit pointed out that "COMFER does not treat complaints or complaints from users on the contents issued", and that, moreover, it did not put into practice what is established in article 42 of the National Constitution, which provides The participation of consumer associations in television content. "It is remarkable the inaction of the entity in the proposal and sanction of norms that allow the protection of the rights" of the viewers, adds the report.
 
COMFER "has not had the capacity to deal with the profound transformations of the last two decades in the information and entertainment market," concludes the AGN and adds: "It is notorious that the agency has not participated in the process of modernization of the State (because) control continues to be performed in the same way when there were only a few air channels."