Supreme Audit Office criticises Culture Ministry's handling of restoration funds

The Supreme Audit Office has criticised the Ministry of Culture's handling of funds earmarked for the preservation and restoration of national cultural heritage sites as non-transparent and lacking clear goals. In the results of an audit published in a press release on Monday, the Supreme Audit Office said that the criteria by which the ministry assessed and selected projects to receive funding were non-transparent and unclear in three programs out of six, which created unequal conditions for applicants. They also said that the culture ministry failed to set out clear and tangible goals for what it wanted to achieve with its financial support, which made it difficult to evaluate what it had achieved.

The inspectors also revealed shortcomings in the evaluation of projects, which in some cases took a disproportionately long time. In extreme cases, the entire process from applying to receiving funding took up to one and a half years. The auditors blamed this partly on the fact that the ministry didn't have a digital system for handling the applications and had to deal with them in paper form.

The inspection covered 2.6 billion crowns earmarked for six restoration programs between 2019 and 2022, which the ministry divided among 7,457 projects.