Your largest expenses are for personal services and cannot be audited; the efficiency of the investment is unknown
The violence of organized crime and insecurity in the country is out of control, while the new body of the National Guard acts without coordination, without a strategy, with onerous resources and in opacity, concludes an analysis by the Center for Economic Research and Budgetary, AC.
The study, delivered to the Chamber of Deputies, even warns that “the opacity of spending by the Armed Forces makes it impossible to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending, without being able to determine whether or not the Guard meets its objectives.”
“As the goal of the number of barracks and elements established by the Secretariat for Security and Citizen Participation (for 2021) remains pending, there is no diagnosis on the effectiveness of the Guard in public security,” he says.
It indicates that considering the increase of 50 billion pesos announced by the Chief Executive, “the budget of the National Guard in 2021 is 103 thousand 935 million pesos, equivalent to 0.41 percent of GDP and 2.5 times the budget plus stop assigned to the Federal Police in 2015 ”.
However, he stresses, there is a lack of strategy and coordination in spending on security. It states that “in the Expenditure Budget for 2021, more than half of the National Guard’s spending goes to personal services.”
It explains that since the creation of the National Guard it was considered that its force status would be made up of members of the Federal Police, as well as elements of the Sedena and the Navy. As of December 2020, the Guard was made up of 24,174 elements from the Federal Police, 59,548 from Sedena and 16,513 from the Navy.
“However, in the Analysis of Positions and Remunerations of the Ministry of Public Security, only 41,813 elements related to the provision of service in the Guard can be identified, so there are more than 58,000 members of the Guard who receive their payments outside of the places of the SSPC ”, he adds.
It clarifies that “the foregoing is possible, since, legally, the members of the Armed Forces must be functionally separated from their armed institution of origin and attached to the National Guard, which allows Sedena and the Navy to keep their assets on their payroll. , while these are part of the National Guard ”.
“The foregoing restricts transparency and accountability, since as they belong to the Armed Forces, personal services cannot be audited by the Superior Audit of the Federation, so the efficiency in the use of resources is unknown, in addition to the fact that the budget exercised by the National Guard seems less than the one actually exercised, ”he notes.
He emphasizes that “the National Guard exercises more resources than it has budgeted for. The legal aspects of the integration of the members of the Secretariat of Defense and the Secretariat of the Navy in the National Guard, and the object of the expenditure of the Military Police and the Naval Police indicate that these resources are used for the operation of the National Guard ”.
He also notes that “if the National Guard joins the Sedena, the only civil institution with a national presence in charge of public security would be lost. The Armed Forces would be in charge of de facto public security, which have been present since the origin of the National Guard ”.
Source: elfinanciero.com.mx
