In compliance with EU legislation regulating the Excessive Deficit Protocol, on 29 September the Spanish authorities sent Eurostat and the European Commission the final figures on the accounts of the Public Administration Services for 2013, together with the provisional figures for 2014. These figures were published on the Internet the same day as they were notified to the European authorities.
The figures for 2013 included public investments corresponding to various public-private partnership agreements signed in previous years by the Regional Government of Catalonia and the City Council of Zaragoza which the national statistics authorities were unaware of until this year.
In accordance with the criteria employed on previous occasions, these expenses have been allocated to the 2013 financial year, the year for which the final national accounting figures had not been definitively closed off, regardless of the year in which these were actually accrued.
In the case of the Regional Government of Catalonia, the increase in expenditure for 2013 amounted to 1.32 billion euros, deriving from investments in roads and prisons, while the increase in expenditure for the City Council of Zaragoza was down to the construction of the tramway for the sum of 200 million euros.
In the habitual process of verifying information that arises between the submission of the figures and the 15 October each year, the national statistics authorities and Eurostat concluded that the ideal situation was to allocate the expenses deriving from these contracts to the 2015 financial year, since it has only been during the course of the present financial year that the public administration services responsible for these contracts have disclosed their existence to the national statistics authorities.
Consequently, the need for financing and the debt of the public administration services in the financial year 2013 amounted to 1.52 billion euros less than those published on 29 September. Even with these new figures, the deficit target committed to with the European authorities for these years has still been met.
On another note, and in light of the existence of contracts signed in previous financial years which were not taken into consideration in the accounts of the public administration services for these years, since they had not been notified to the statistics authorities until 2015, the Technical Committee for National Accounts will implement actions directly designed to verify and contrast the information supplied by the public administration services in the coming days and open the corresponding investigation procedures.
EFE