Government admits that General State Account will take years to comply with the law

O deputy Secretary of State and Budget, José Maria Brandão de Brito, today admitted that it is impossible for the task that is required to ensure compliance of the State's General Account to be done in a couple of years.

In the debate on the General Account of the State (CGE) of 2025, held today in parliament, the Secretary of State was confronted with the opinion of the Court of Auditors (TdC) which considered that the document was not in accordance with the Budgetary Framework Law (LEO), and continued not to include the consolidated budgetary and financial statements of the Central Administration and Social Security.

José Maria Brandão de Brito signaled that the TdC recognizes that necessary actions are being taken to solve problems, stressing that the Government is changing diplomas, improving procedures, changing requests for information to entities and training them to migrate the accounting system.

In addition, the Government is “muniting the entities of the Public Administrations of the necessary information systems” to ensure that the main obstacle that concerns the presentation of the consolidated financial account can be overcome, which is not possible with the systems that exist today.

“The task that is required to ensure compliance of the EGC is impossible to do in a couple of years,” he reiterated, pointing out that the challenge the Government has is, “over the term of office, to comply with what is required.”.

The Secretary of State also recalled that in the discussion of the GSC of 2024 he stated that they wanted to make this document an instrument for evaluating public policies, by associating performance indicators to the resources allocated to each government area, having taken another step in this direction in the 2025 account, applying the methodology to eight government areas.

In the GSC of 2026, the assessment will cover the entire central administration and the social security subsector, he assured, pointing out that this will allow better conditions to discuss the results achieved and their contribution to improving people's lives.

The governor also pointed out the challenge he had already left to rethink the GCC’s assessment deadlines, pointing out that this discussion is being held “only 159 days after the report was delivered and less than a month after the publication of the TdC’s opinion within the shortest period of the last 30 years”.

For Brando de Brito, the closer the parliamentary assessment of the exercise to which it relates, the greater its usefulness will be to scrutinise and inform the following budgetary decisions.