A few weeks ago, this newspaper detailed the information already available on the extraordinary expense of the Barcelona’s town hall to deal with the covid emergency. It was 75 million euros divided among 424 companies. Now this exercise accountability and transparency continues offering the detail of what the 1,783 million euros that were part of the hiring before the pandemic by the Generalitat of Catalunya and which were the 25 companies that channeled a greater volume of these funds. The fate of these items, the profile of the beneficiary companies and the price of the contracted services have not set off any alarms or brought to light any cases that accumulate the number of indications of alleged corruption, influence peddling or direct fraud that do begin to leak in the scope of other administrations, specifically the regional and local ones in Madrid. Until now, the process of auditing public accounts, which is still in its infancy, has indicated the existence of some isolated case of deception in which the victim was the Generalitat and some hiring procedures bordering on incorrectness, in both cases within the margins understandable in an extreme emergency situation in which the supply chain for medical supplies became a universal bazaar in which there was speculation on the price of such basic products as masks, gowns and gloves (or equipment that suddenly became a basic need in volumes never foreseen, such as respirators).
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In this context, the price of some elements (such as face masks) in the early stages of the pandemic may be striking from the current context; but it was a generalized situation (and the cases in which an absurd cost overrun has uncovered a network of embarrassing commissions have already begun to parade towards the courts), which became normalized after production began to adjust to demand. In the detail of purchases made The volume of investment needed to facilitate teleworking for public officials and students is striking and the online provision of services that had never been considered to stop being face-to-face: the digitalization at forced marches of these services was a bill that could be attributed in part to the low degree of digitization of the public sector until then (but inevitable once he had to face his transformation for reasons of force majeure).
But both in the areas in which particularly shameful practices have already begun to surface in a vital emergency situation, such as in those in which there is no similar indication, the amount of public money invested and the relaxation of controls that occurred by activating public procurement mechanisms in a state of emergency legally provided require redouble transparency and control actions. There should be no room for doubt that the emergence of firms with modest billings up to that time or with no previous experience in the sector, or the high volume of contracts awarded by administrations without contrasting different offers, is a logical result of the adaptability, agility and ability in the foreign market of some companies and the need to react under unimaginable pressure from the public sector, and not the consequences of actions that still need to be clarified.