Draft law: heads of public institutions, severely sanctioned for unrecovered damages

Heads of public institutions who either do not order the necessary measures, or do not follow through on their implementation, so that the damages found by the Court of Auditors are fully recovered, will risk imprisonment of up to 5 years and the prohibition of certain rights, states a legislative initiative submitted by USR parliamentarians, Oana Murariu, Stelian Ion, Alexandru Dimitriu, Dumitru Văduva, Simona Spătaru and Ciprian Rus, according to a press release issued by the respective political party.

"Over 758 million lei represents the damage to the Romanian state discovered by the Court of Auditors in just one year. Why doesn't the state recover this money? Because almost no one is held accountable before the law. The managements of the audited institutions most of the time order the measures established in the reports, but they do not follow up on their implementation. From now on, through the submitted project, we are changing this way of working, because public money is our money, that of every citizen. We are forcing the authorities to really fight for the recovery of damages from public money!", declared after the submission of the project to Parliament, according to the cited source, deputy Oana Murariu, member of the Legal Committee of the Chamber of Deputies.

In its current form, the Court of Auditors Law (no. 94/1992) provides for the recovery of damages found following audit actions as an essential mechanism for protecting public funds. However, holding people in management positions accountable is, in practice, almost impossible to achieve due to the wording of the law, which assumes the cumulative fulfillment of two requirements: both the failure to order and the failure to follow up on the measures transmitted. This means that, in order to escape criminal liability, it is enough for the heads of institutions to formally order measures, without also following up whether they have been implemented and the damage has actually been recovered.

The USR draft comes to correct this situation, so that the law clearly provides that both the failure to order the measures transmitted by the Court of Auditors and their failure to follow up on them constitute a crime. Additionally, also in order to oblige the heads of public institutions to fight in a real way for the recovery of damages, the USR draft eliminates the possibility of sanctioning only with a criminal fine and increases the punishment limits (imprisonment from 1 to 5 years, instead of imprisonment from 3 months to 1 year). At the same time, the complementary penalty of no longer holding a management position within a legal entity under public law is introduced, given the fact that the crime committed involved the defective exercise of the attributions of managing public funds.