The Administrative Court (TA) is the supreme audit institution for public accounts in Mozambique. It is a formally independent “Oversight – control” institution. However, it has carried out annual audits that do not cover even half of the State Budget, which means that a large part of public funds is at the mercy of acts of mismanagement by public managers. This situation can also be observed by the number of managers sanctioned by the TA and the cases/processes that this instance shared with the Public Prosecutor's Office (MP) in 2017, due to suspicions that there are signs of involvement of these in criminal cases in its management.
The justification that has been put forward by this institution for not carrying out audits that are much above the 50% is related to the reduced number of qualified human resources and materials (lack of sufficient funds to carry out the audits) and in some cases, delays in disbursements by partners1. With regard to human resources, the example is the findings that are repeated annually in the Report and Opinion on the General State Account (CGE), and which are justified by the TA as resulting from the departure of auditors from the institution already trained on certain matters, and the need to appoint substitutes, who then commit the same mistakes/failures that were already remedied in the previous auditors.
