The Juan XXIII Center (Centro Juan XXIII) issued a statement on the impasse among the five members of the Chamber of Accounts (CCRD), the government entity in charge of auditing government, and sides with the president of the Chamber of Accounts Janel Ramirez and member Mario Fernandez.
The Juan XXIII Center is a non-partisan think tank and watchdog group that is highly respected and has served as a mediator in several critical situations in the past.
The statement recalls a first agreement was signed by Janel Ramirez, Mario Fernandez and Elsa Peña Peña, three of the 5 members of the CCRD. But subsequently, Elsa Peña Peña would side with dissident members Tomasina Tolentino and Elsa María Catano Ramirez, resulting in the present stagnation of work at the Chamber of Deputies.
“In this mediation exercise, we witnessed that the two members of the Plenary of the Chamber of Accounts who signed the agreement on 13 September 2022, have maintained from the first day a coherent position, backed up with proof and evidence, in favor of transparency and the institutionalism of the collegiate body,” states the Juan XXIII public notice.
The entity continues: “The rest of the members have either been ambivalent or have spent most of their time in stirring up diatribes and internal conspiracies. They have made use of their mechanical majority to act and make decisions that are questionable and at odds with the law, such as: a) supplanting the function of the President of the Plenary; b) approving questionable audits carried out by the previous Chamber of Accounts, in ignorance of the legal mandate that the President is the one who guarantees the quality of the auditing work; c) preventing the staff purging process from being carried out, trying instead to impose a staff distribution policy, which also contravenes the organic law of the CCRD because the President is the highest executive authority; and, d) have hindered the implementation of the online preventive auditing system that would allow the real time auditing of the execution of the National Budget.
“This group has managed to cloak all this action in the veil of secrecy imposed by the previous Plenary of the Chamber of Accounts, which made the unconstitutional decision to classify as confidential all the minutes and recordings of the meetings of the Plenary. The majority have refused to modify this opaque precedent.”
In its concluding statements, the center says it categorically rejects the course of action and considers that those who have been responsible for not implementing the agreement should be assessed in proportion to the damage they are causing to the nation.
“We urge the Chamber of Deputies to investigate the reasons why the rest of the members did not want to sign and implement the proposed agreement and that at the moment of formulating their accusations for an eventual impeachment trial, they do so following the universal principle of justice, which consists of giving each one what they deserve for their actions, determining the responsibility of each one of the members of the CCRD Plenary and formalizing in a precise and individual manner the charges brought against each member. No one should be held responsible for the actions of another.”
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Centro Juan XXIII
DR1 News
DR1 News
28 June 2023