Big Brother for public works
A new bill by the Ministry of National Economy and Finance provides for the creation of a Register for Recording and Monitoring Maintenance and Operation Expenditures of the Public Investments Program (PIP).
The new register, which will monitor and ensure the smooth financing for the maintenance of projects for up to a decade after their completion, was presented on Tuesday by Minister Kostis Hatzidakis and his deputy Nikos Papathanasis.
The bill concerns public projects, national and co-financed, and aims to speed them up, to absorb funds more efficiently, to better plan them and ensure their funding in a timely manner, as well as to further reduce bureaucracy.
In addition to the above mechanism for the maintenance of the works, the bill also provides for PIP’s transformation into the Public Investment Development Program (PIDP). That is divided into the co-financed part, which includes projects financed by resources of the European Union and other international financial organizations (such as the National Strategic Reference Framework, Recovery Fund, programs of the European Economic Area etc), and by national resources etc; and the national part that includes projects that are financed purely from national resources, such as the National Development Program.
The bill also establishes a Long-Term Commitments Axis with a 20-year horizon for projects whose completion costs extend beyond the respective programming period, in order to monitor the projects more effectively.
A separate account is created for the financing of natural disaster prevention and response projects, and the execution and monitoring of related payments. The aim is to manage and monitor these projects faster and more efficiently.
Also an obligation is introduced for funding bodies to estimate their costs and report on them to the PIDP every September during the preparation stage of the next year’s budget in conjunction with the medium-term fiscal plan.
Hatzidakis emphasized that since 2019, Greece has achieved a historically high investment increase, amounting in total to 41.3%, compared to the eurozone average of 1%.
