PP and Vox have presented their own proposals in Congress with the objective of rejecting the General State Account of 2024, in which it was stated that the Executive resorted to approximately 2.4 billion euros from unused European funds to finance pensions, and to demand that the Court of Auditors prepare a new report in which the non-existence of current General State Budgets (PGE) is censured.
Both parties make this demand in their motions for resolution to the Declaration on the General State Account corresponding to the fiscal year 2024, which will have to be debated in the Joint Committee (Congress-Senate) for relations with the Court of Auditors, where PP and Vox have an absolute majority. A closed-door meeting of the subcommittee is already scheduled for next Tuesday, June 16.
The initiative of Santiago Abascal's party proposes returning the declaration to the Court of Auditors, alleging various reasons, including the lack of General State Budgets, the Government's resort to continuous budgetary modifications, the risks associated with these alterations, the deterioration of public finances, and the dissenting opinion issued by a counselor of the Court of Auditors on said declaration.
As for the proposal registered by Alberto Núñez Feijóo's group, it also calls for the return of the declaration to the Court of Auditors and for the auditing body to subsequently prepare, within a period that is "non-extendable and inexcusable" of three months, a specific report detailing the consequences of keeping the accounts without updated Budgets.
A possible rejection without recent precedent
If Congress ultimately opts to reject the General State Account, it would be an unusual event in recent times. Just a year ago, the report of the Court of Auditors was unanimously supported within the body itself and subsequently ratified in Parliament without objections.
The PSOE has also presented its motions for resolution, but in no case does it propose returning the declaration to the Court of Auditors or condemning the lack of Budgets. It is limited to urging the Government to adopt the necessary measures to correct the caveats and deficiencies that the auditing body may have pointed out in the declaration.
When presenting the report last Tuesday, the president of the Court, Enriqueta Chicano, specified that the body's reproach was not due to European funds having been allocated to inadequate purposes, but rather to the fact that a budgetary modification of service 50 of European funds was resorted to in a prolonged fiscal year.
The Court is already analyzing the impact of the budget extension
Chicano also advanced the possibility of commissioning a "legal-technical" study on the implications that budget extensions have on the management of public accounts, taking into account that the country has had its Budgets extended since 2023.
The way the Government managed European funds and the warning from the Court of Auditors motivated the Declaration of the General Account to be approved with a dissenting particular vote from one of the councilors. Six other councilors also issued particular votes, but in their case, concurring explanatory votes, meaning favorable to the agreement although with nuances.
On this point, Chicano stressed that the dissenting vote did not constitute an "unprecedented" circumstance and emphasized that the existence of a particular vote does not modify the position approved by the Plenary, which was a majority one. The president also detailed that the discrepancy of the councilor who opposed focused on the "technical treatment of a specific budgetary modification."
Finally, the president of the Court censured the partisan use of the matter, lamenting the reputational impact generated by a mere "political framing" and the "distortion" in public perception and media debate, which in her opinion projected a "bad image of Spain that has been given from Spain."