Court of Auditors warns against weakening supervision

A president of the Court of Auditors (TdC) today argued that any reform of public finances should not weaken external audit of expenditure in order to protect democracies in a context in which States mobilise large resources in the face of unforeseen events.

“Any reform of the legislative framework of these institutions – and of the substantive public finances system itself – should not result in a weakening of the control of public finances, specifically of external control of public finances,” said Filipa Urbano Calvão, referring to the role of the Portuguese Court of Auditors and the European Court of Auditors (ECA).

Filipa Urbano Calvão's position comes at a time when a proposal from the Government amending the court's organisation is under discussion in the specialty, reducing the number of cases in which the approval of public expenditure is subject to a prior visa from the TdC and exempting contracts up to EUR 10 million from prior supervision.

During the presentation of the European Court of Auditors’ annual report of 2025 to Portuguese public administration officials in Lisbon today, Urbano Calvão warned that “in a specific context of increasing external challenges to the public finances of the European Union and the Member States”, any change cannot neglect external control, of which one of the vertices is the TdC.

The president of the court reinforced that the challenges arising from the fragility and unpredictability of the world today, with the war in the Middle East, the continuation of the war in Ukraine, the rising energy prices and inflationary pressures, the trade disputes and the risks associated with the “very accelerated development of Artificial Intelligence” and the disasters resulting from climate change oblige states to make a “very large financial effort, forcing governments to make often difficult choices” to affect public resources.

In this context, he said, “the role of control institutions, in particular external control” – such as the TdC and the TEC – “is of greater importance in ensuring that public resources – of all – are used with rigour, responsibility and effectiveness in meeting the needs of the community”.

Urbano Calvão has ensured that both the TdC and the TEC will continue to “scruit the management of public policies and programmes and the use of financial resources with independence, rigour and sense of responsibility”.

In the presence of the Portuguese member of the European Court of Auditors, former Finance Minister João Leão, Filipa Urbano Calvão underlined the role of this institution, making a “functional parallelism” between the annual ECA report on the European Union budget and the opinion given by the national Court of Auditors to the State General Account.