More than 20 PRR (Plan for Recovery and Resilience Plan) contracts have been considered irregular by Portugal’s Court of Auditors (TdC) – and each one has had to be followed up to determine financial responsibility, Filipa Calvão, president of the institution has told Lusa in an interview.
PRR contracts, running to a strict timeframe, are subject to a special inspection regime, in which the court has “some powers to stop the execution of the contract in the face of certain types of more serious illegalities”, Calvão explained
If the TdC “finds irregularities other than these, it moves on to a process of identifying signs of financial responsibility, which it then submits to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for possible financial responsibility.”
“Some of these contracts are progressing towards this process of establishing financial responsibility,” she said, referring to the more than 20 cases that are currently at this stage.
There are “a series of cases, again more than 20, that are already being cleared of financial responsibility, which means that irregularities were committed and that the Court was unable, in its intervention when the contract was being executed, to correct the illegalities,” she said.
As these irregularities were not susceptible to correction “ex post”, the path the court had to take was to move on to “financial liability”.
Filipa Calvão recalled that, at the end of 2024, a special prior inspection regime was approved that covered all public spending contracts for the implementation of European funds, both from the PRR and other sources of funding.
For the TdC president, it is unclear whether this special regime has led to faster execution of contracts, The court has no specific data on this, although Calvão points out that “the difficulty in implementing the PRR is also related to the PRR regime itself”.
“It’s a difficult regime because it is quite demanding in terms of requirements and then with a very short deadline for implementation.”
Filipa Calvão also rejected “the narrative that the court’s prior review is the cause of the non-execution of European funds or of delays in the execution of European funds”, not least because, she said, most of the time administrative bodies deliver files close to deadlines.
Organisations take a long time to obtain the funds, because the procedure is complex, the TdC president explains. “When they have the contract signed and come to the court,” they are already at the limit of the deadline for executing the contract. At this stage, the time taken by the TdC to analyse the contract “is relatively short compared to all the time that has elapsed before the administrative bodies came to the court”.
Thus, Filipa Calvão argues that “it’s not really the court’s intervention that delays the execution of the funds”.
According to the plan’s latest monitoring report, the execution of the PRR has remained at 47% since November. The Portuguese government submitted the final revision of the PRR – which runs out of time in mid-2026 – to the European Commission on the last day of October.
Government seeks to ‘wriggle around’ TdC powers
Filipa Calvão’s interview came at a time when the government is seeking parliamentary approval to wriggle around the TdC powers of ‘prior approval’ – a review of public tender contracts in advance, before the contracts can proceed.
PRR contracts do not require ‘prior approval’ (because of the timeframes involved), but the government considers that doing away with the mechanism, and increasing checking powers further down the line, would bring Portugal more in line with European practices.
Source material: LUSA
