The Preventive Financial Control Visa in EU-Funded Local Projects: Volume, Deadline and the Constraint That Actually Binds
The Preventive Financial Control Visa in EU-Funded Local Projects: Volume, Deadline and the Constraint That Actually Binds

Summary/Abstract: Romanian public entities must obtain a preventive financial control visa on every budget commitment and every payment authorisation before the credit officer may approve it. This paper asks what that obligation means, in workload and in liquidity, for a small rural municipality implementing a multi-annual project financed from European funds. From the approved budgets of eleven such projects and an operational model based on the Romanian phases of public expenditure, it derives 2,934 controlled operations across the eleven projects, an average of 6.44 per municipality per month, of which 79.8 per cent are payment authorisations. A single-server queueing benchmark shows that average volume is irrelevant to the three-working-day deadline: at five operations per working day the utilisation rate is at most 0.070. The ordinary month-end batch of five or six files clears within a day, but the opening of each budget year brings between 16 and 20 files at once, and at five operations per working day the last of them is reached only after up to 3.8 working days, beyond the deadline in ten of the eleven municipalities; at ten per day every municipality complies. A second constraint binds everywhere: the person granting the visa may not be one of those initiating the operation, and in all eleven projects the initiating roles, on average 4.9 per municipality, are financed from the project while the visa is not. Each day added to the control sequence widens the aggregate financing gap of the eleven projects by approximately 45,852 RON.

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