The Government breaks records this year of budget manipulation by already modifying 40,000 million in the extended accounts

The Government of Pedro Sánchez reaches the final stretch of the campaign with record budget manipulation, squeezing out all possible avenues to govern with the public accounts of 2023. The engineering reaches such a point that the complete map of what it is doing cannot be seen.

This is how serious the situation is described by the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) in its report this week, because the Government's budget juggling this year is even more intense than in previous years. Its manipulation of items in this year is close to 40,000 million, a record for AIReF if we leave out the exceptional year that was the pandemic, where it could be justified to widely modify the planned Budget.

"With data until August 2026, the latest available, the accumulated volume of modifications in non-financial operations already exceeded that recorded at the close of all previous years in the series, except 2020, marked by the exceptional impact of the pandemic," AIReF points out in the document. Until August, the Minister of Finance, Arcadi España, had already spent 38.24 billion euros in expenditures with respect to the extended budgets, outperforming his predecessor, María Jesús Montero, which is not easy.

To do this, according to AIReF, the Ministry is once again playing with the funds from the Recovery Plan committed to Brussels. The "flexible regime" set up with this European money "has especially contributed to the proliferation of transfers, generations and incorporations of credit," according to this body that watches over public accounts. The result is a monstrosity of opacity and spending beyond parliamentary control. "Recourse to these exceptions reduces the traceability of spending, limits budget transparency and affects accountability," says AIReF in the chapter prepared by the director of the Budget Analysis division, Ignacio Ruiz-Huertas.

"The growing distance between the initial budget and the expenditure finally executed makes it difficult to compare both (...) Furthermore, budget modifications are not subject to the same process of debate and prior and joint parliamentary authorization as the approval of new budgets, which makes it difficult to have a global vision of the spending priorities for the year," it is stated.

The General Account of 2025

The opacity with which budgeting is already carried out in the fourth economy of the euro is impressive, as if that of previous years were not enough. Just these days, the Comptroller General of the State, Pablo Arellano, justifies himself as best he can in the General Account of the State for 2025 that he has just sent to the Court of Accounts and to which EL MUNDO has had access.

The report shows that, when Sánchez governed without budgets, a festival of budget modifications occurred again last year, Montero's last year, including the use, again, of items allocated to European funds for Social Security expenses, but Arellano does not make evaluations: «The objective and purpose of the General State Account is not to show the impact or consequences of the extension (...) nor to analyze the origin or opportunity of the budget modifications; but, simply show those that have finally been approved.

That is, the General Comptroller of the State limits himself to describing the modifications and asking someone else to give his opinion. The most that this senior official assigned to the Ministry of Finance admits is that "the situation in the 2025 financial year of the extension of the General State Budgets for the 2023 financial year in some way conditions the financial activity carried out by the public sector in 2025." And so much.

And the use of European funds? Arellano says he has a report from the State Attorney's Office that validates using the "surplus" for other expenses as if it were any other modifiable budget item. This contravenes, at the very least, the spirit of Montero's promise to Brussels that a budgetary service, number 50, would be created exclusively for European funds, preventing the community manna from being used for any other use.

With the validation of this rinse, Arellano thus distances itself from the Court of Accounts, which has questioned the legality of these deviations. The European Commission has admitted that the Government has been using liquidity from European funds to pay public employee pensions and other expenses, but does not see it as illegal. It has also allowed the first vice president, Carlos Body, not to send the so-called budget plan like the rest of his counterparts, arguing that by governing with an extension he has nothing new to contribute. It can be very risky, as the markets are sensitive to France's accounts, but whoever wins on 29-N should shed light on the accounting.