The head of the Chamber of Accounts, Licelott Marte de Barrios told an audience at the Dominican Municipal League yesterday, Tuesday 27 August that the amount of misappropriated funds in the different state and municipal bodies of this country is enough to fund a second Dominican Republic. Speaking to mayors and directors of municipal districts in an effort to get these authorities to hand in their budget reports to the Chamber of Accounts and other budgetary watch groups on time, she stated that “nobody likes the monitoring that we carry out through the Chamber of Accounts because there is no tradition of accountability in this country.” El Nuevo Diario reports that Marte said that the Dominican Municipal League was making all efforts to make the use of budgets at the municipal level more transparent.
The Chamber of Accounts is the government body in charge of monitoring the correct use of government funds. Nevertheless, despite the billions spent on preparing the audits, they have been used more for political manipulation than for controlling the correct use of government funds. At best the audits have been used for investigative journalistic reports, but only in rare cases have irregularities in the use of funds been taken to the last consequences.