Arturo Sanchez Jimenez
Newspaper La Jornada
Friday, March 11, 2022, p. 13
In the states and municipalities of the country, 65 percent of the irregularities detected by the Superior Audit of the Federation (ASF) in the 2020 public account are concentrated, which add up to 39 thousand 565.7 million pesos, which is equivalent to the budget of the secretariats of National Defense and the Navy.
As part of the audit of the 2020 public account, the ASF reviewed the exercise of federal public resources exercised by local governments, what is known as federalized spending, and that in that year amounted to one billion 955 thousand 684 million pesos, which represent 32.6 percent of the total net spending of the Federation, which was 6 million 7 thousand 719 million pesos.
Emilio Barriga, special auditor of the Federalized Expenditure of the ASF, presented yesterday to the Surveillance Commission of the Chamber of Deputies a report in which he indicated that in 2020 the federalized expenditure was divided into two components: 43 percent, that is, 843 One thousand 545 million pesos, were federal participations, which constitute resources that are used for purposes defined by local congresses, and the remaining 57 percent was programmable federalized spending, that is, funds whose destination is conditioned by the Federation.
Barriga indicated that federal spending represented an average of 82.3 percent of the 32 federal entities and stated that there is a worrying dependence of the state and municipal governments on the resources provided by the Federation.
In Guerrero, Oaxaca, Tlaxcala, Chiapas, Hidalgo, Morelos, Michoacán, Nayarit, Tabasco, Zacatecas, Veracruz and Yucatán, federal resources represent more than 90 percent of the local budget, while in Jalisco they are 87 percent and in Nuevo León 77 percent. The only exception is Mexico City, since only 49 percent of its resources are supplied by the Federation.
The five states with the greatest irregularities observed by the ASF in the 2020 public account are Oaxaca, with 4 thousand 763 million pesos to clarify; Nayarit, with 3 thousand 138 million pesos; Michoacán, with 2 thousand 634; Chihuahua, with 2,417, and Guerrero, with 2,351. Barriga clarified that these are amounts that are in a stage of resolution in which the audited institutions can justify the exercise of those resources.
Meanwhile, the entities in which the irregularities observed were less than 100 million pesos are Mexico City, Sinaloa, the state of Mexico, Tabasco, Jalisco, Yucatán, Campeche, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes and Querétaro.
