The Plenary of the Parliament of Andalusia has approved this Wednesday to begin the processing of the bill promoted by PP-A and Vox, partners in the Andalusian Government, to amend the Law of the Court of Auditors of Andalusia (CCA), in force since March 1988. The aim is to eliminate the obligation for "all parliamentary groups" to have "the right, as a minimum" to appoint a councillor to the supervisory body.
At the session taking it into consideration, only the proposing groups intervened, since PSOE-A, Adelante Andalucía and Por Andalucía have decided not to attend the debate by backing the general strike called, leaving their seats vacant during the parliamentary discussion.
In the current legislature, five groups could designate, at least, one councillor: PP-A, PSOE-A, Vox, Adelante Andalucía and Por Andalucía. In the Court of Auditors, there are councillors elected at the proposal of all of them except Adelante Andalucía, which in the previous term was part of the mixed group. After the regional elections of May, this formation obtained eight seats and formed its own group, which for the first time granted it the right to propose a councillor.
The spokesperson for Adelante Andalucía, José Ignacio García, has already indicated that his group will go to the Constitutional Court with an amparo appeal if the reform of the Court of Auditors Law is ultimately approved.
In defending the initiative, the PP-A deputy María Isabel Lozano emphasized that the three opposition groups have limited themselves to launching "criticisms and reproaches" against the reform and, when the time came to debate it in the Plenary, they chose to absent themselves to support the general strike. "It is coherent, because their criticisms were empty criticisms and, for that reason, their seats are empty today," she said.
Lozano insisted that "the independence of an institution is not proclaimed, it is demonstrated and it starts with those who have the responsibility to exercise it, and from that principle, we defend the reform, which does not alter the structure of the Court of Auditors nor the fundamental guarantees for the election of its members".
As he has explained, "what we propose is to eliminate the additional rule for proposing candidates", and he has argued that "respecting political pluralism does not mean granting the same guarantee of representation to those who have a very different level of parliamentary representation, and that does not mean giving up pluralism; rather, it means understanding that pluralism must be the result of dialogue and parliamentary agreements and not imposed through a legal obligation."
The Vox deputy Benito Morillo has stressed that the Chamber of Auditors "is not there to satisfy the interests of any political party or to hand out seats" nor "can it be turned into an instrument at the service of the parliamentary majorities of each moment", but that its function is "to audit the money of all Andalusians."
Morillo added that "an independent institution is not one in which each party has a seat guaranteed; it is one in which those who make it up can work independently of the parties that propose them, and that is precisely the core of this initiative." Along those lines, he recalled that "what is being proposed is to remove the guarantee that each parliamentary group, with the exception of the mixed group, has assured an adviser at its own proposal. We believe that this modification makes all the sense in the world, because one thing is for Parliament to participate in the appointment of the people responsible for an institution, and quite another is for the parties to try to turn it into an extension of their political structures."
Content and scope of the bill proposal
The bill proposal, registered with the regional chamber on October 16, introduces a single change: "to delete the second paragraph of section 1 of article 24" of the Law of the Chamber of Auditors. In that paragraph it is established that "all the parliamentary groups of the Parliament of Andalusia, with the exception of the mixed group, have the right, as a minimum, for one of the members chosen to come from their proposal" and that "if this were not possible according to criteria of pure proportionality, the seat shall be ceded to the proposal which, having already secured the election of an Adviser, has obtained the smaller remainder in the application of the aforementioned criteria."
The reform eliminates those clauses and establishes that the processing will be done "on an urgent basis" in Parliament. The text justifies the speed because four of the seven councillors complete their six-year term at the beginning of 2027 and it is intended to prevent that, as already happened in the past, they remain in office indefinitely due to the lack of sufficient majorities to renew the positions, which would reduce the term time of their replacements and would affect the legitimacy of those who continue in the position after exhausting their period.
The first paragraph of point 1 of Article 24 of the CCA Law remains unchanged. It establishes that "the councillors, numbering seven, shall be designated by the Parliament of Andalusia by means of a vote and by a majority of three fifths of its members, for a period of six years, being renewed every three in succession for three and four sevenths. Those who in the immediately preceding year have been in charge of the management, inspection or intervention of income and expenditure of the public sector in Andalusia may not be designated as councillors, nor may those who have been recipients of subsidies or beneficiaries of guarantees or exemptions granted by any of the entities indicated in Article 2".
In the statement of reasons it is emphasized that "while the requirement of a qualified majority of three fifths of the legislative assembly is commonplace, in order to ensure broad support from political forces with representation in Parliament, even though at times the majority provided for in second votes may be reduced if it is not reached in the first, the requirement that each parliamentary group, with the exception of the mixed group, has the right to have at least one of those it has proposed be elected as councillor, places the Accounts Chamber of Andalusia as a 'rare bird' in the comparative landscape, without it being possible to argue that this particularity has provided any advantage in its functioning".
The text also argues that, "by putting the right of parliamentary groups with a very small number of deputies ahead of the will of the rest of the legislative chamber, the opinion that a few deputies may have regarding the professional qualification of the proposed candidates is being prioritized over the opinion of a very broad majority of Parliament, which offers fewer guarantees of achieving recognized competence in all those elected".
In addition, it is warned that "this rule leads to a greater identification of the members of the Chamber of Accounts with the respective sponsoring parliamentary groups, which does not exactly contribute to the perception of independence of judgment and objectivity in the performance of their functions".
According to the proposal, the obligation for each group to have at least one member "may end up blocking the necessary renewal of the members of the body, despite the existence even of parliamentary support greater than its three-fifths, thus preventing the proper control of public funds; not to mention its impossible fulfillment if at any time there were eight parliamentary groups, with seven being the number of members of the Chamber of Accounts of Andalucía".