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The Office of the Head of State has long operated in an unstable budgetary environment

Bratislava, 17 May 2024 - Auditors of the Supreme Audit Office (SAO) of the Slovak Republic returned to the Presidential Palace after five years to check how the Chancellery of the President of the Slovak Republic managed public funds and handled state property at the end of President Zuzana Čaputová' s mandate.

Two areas appear risky, namely the budget approved by the government and the Parliament for the proper operation of the Chancellery. In none of the audited years from 2019 to 2023 the approved budgets did not cover even the actual planned needs of the Chancellery, even though they requested an increase in the expenditure limit every year. The second area is the housing of the President in the Slavín residence, which has been unresolved for twenty years. Although the Chancellery has taken several partial steps, the problem will remain on the shoulders of the new Head of State. The effective internal control system of the President's office, in which auditors found no deficiencies, has proved to be an example of good practice for other state institutions. 

The national auditors focused on the President's office after five years. They found the regular audits at the end of the President's mandate in 2015 and 2019 to be beneficial and adopted a similar approach for other significant institutions. 

The office's actual expenditures were on an upward trend in the years audited, falling only once year-on-year, from 2019 to 2020, and ranging from €5.7 to 8.7 million euros. The bulk of the expense was current expenditure, with the largest share of wages and salaries, 63%, for an average of 89 staff members. The second major item was expenditure on goods and services (37 % on average). 

Capital expenditure was mainly used for the partial modernization and renovation of buildings managed by the Chancellery. The value of the assets, in particular properties such as Grassalkovich Palace, Karácsonyi Palace, the Hunting Lodge in Tatranská Javorina and the President's residence in Slavín, increased by a total of around EUR 1 million in the period under review, reaching more than EUR 19 million by the end of 2023. The value of the assets increased mainly due to the modernization and reconstruction of the buildings, including project documentation, the renovation of the façade and the reconstruction of the air-conditioning of the Grassalkovich Palace, the acquisition of software, computer equipment and operating machinery, and the photovoltaic power plant on the roof of the Karácsonyi Palace.

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