The national director of the National Research and Development Agency (ANID), Alejandra Pizarro, ruled out this Saturday that there was “corruption” within the entity, after a report from the Comptroller’s Office.
A financial audit carried out by the Comptroller General of the Republic (CGR) detected various deficiencies in the financial statements of the National Research and Development Agency (ANID), formerly Conicyt, in charge of supervising Fondecyt projects and the delivery of National Scholarships and Chile Scholarships, reported Radio Cooperativa.
The analysis concluded that, among other shortcomings, the state agency did not manage the collection of 46,197,426,161 pesos, which correspond to transfers made to public and private entities between 2018 and 2022, part of the period during which it was headed by the current Minister of Sciences, Aysén Etcheverry.
Likewise, the agency also did not maintain control or records that identified the beneficiaries of the postgraduate study scholarships, the status of the scholarship, its amount, the end date, and compliance with the agreements.
Public politics
“The Comptroller’s report is quite extensive in time and also in sample, because it corresponds to the period 2018-2022, and that covers the period where Conicyt was still, the period where Minister Echeverry was directing, and closes with 2022” , Pizarro pointed out to The counter.
He also highlighted that the observations found by the Comptroller’s Office in this regard refer to a period also marked by the pandemic, as well as Conicyt’s shortage of resources in terms of personnel and technological solutions.
The topic covers scholarships, which is a public policy that has been in place for 35 years, with some 37,900 scholarship recipients who have been funded both in the country and abroad, and that “has had a very important impact as a public policy.”
“However, when it is handed over to Conicyt, it has a history that comes from the BPR scholarships, which are those for the President of the Republic, which came from Mideplan, and some scholarships that are related to the old Conicyt. Those scholarships that are old are the ones that lack information. It’s not that they don’t have information, all the scholarship recipients are identifiable. What do you mean by lack of information? The thing is that in some cases what is asked of you, for example, is the maintenance paid for the month of January to December, and we have that information completely from 2014 to date,” he explains.
In that sense, he said that regarding the agency itself, which corresponds to the mandate of the first two years of the current Minister Etcheverry, “they are covered with all the information that we have, and we have been building and rebuilding those past periods.” ”.
Corruption
When asked if it could be said to be an issue of corruption or a problem of administrative information, Pizarro was emphatic:
“Look, there is no corruption here, that’s first class. Second, there is a lack of administrative information from previous years. The lack of information does not correspond to the current period. “It refers to previous, very ancient periods.”
According to the official, the scholarships have a financing duration of four years. However, between the periods in which they have to obtain the academic degree, they have to make the payment, a total of ten years can easily pass since the scholarship is awarded. And additionally, there could be people who have more than one scholarship, therefore, after about 16 years, scholarship closures only begin to occur, she said.
“That is very important to say, and that is regulated, the awarding of scholarships and competitions is carried out, they are completely transparent, they are published on platforms, there are bankruptcy rules, each of the applications are evaluated by evaluators external to the agency, and They are awarded rigorously with respect to the assigned scores. In fact, you can see in our budget laws that there are some glosses that refer to reporting on the rankings, they refer to reporting on the evaluations that the scholarship recipients receive.”
The Comptroller’s investigation
The official also said that she was aware of the Comptroller’s analysis.
“Yes of course. The Comptroller’s audits are always notified when they begin and are notified to the national management. This audit is not new for us, since 2015 to date we have had about 8 or 10 audits with easily different themes. And this in particular was informed through official notice, I remember, by the Comptroller’s Office that was going to be established and that they were going to start from the audit called Analysis of the Financial Statements, which was a financial audit, but it is a very comprehensive audit, because it not only covers the Financial Statements as a result, but also evaluates the management that impacts the Financial Statements.”
When asked what measures they are going to take or, I don’t know, are evaluating so that this situation does not happen again in the future, Pizarro pointed to various actions.
“First, this audit closed at the end of December 31, 2022, therefore, from that minute until now we have been making progress in resolving each of the cases that the Comptroller’s Office has observed, that on the one hand. Additionally, since we are an agency, since we began to function as an agency as of January 1, 2020, the robustness of the agency’s budgets for administrative support is very different from what Conicyt had.”
He added that in 2023 the entity materialized the possibility and support provided by the Ministry of Finance regarding ANID’s proposal to have greater resources so that its technological solutions could collaborate to solve the management problems that they had identified and, on the other hand, part, to inject resources to have more people. For this reason, starting with the 2023 budget, there was an increase in people of 26 places, “and they have collaborated so that we continue to advance in this and we can not only solve the management problems, but also implement them as solutions now.”
ANID’s responses
He added that, if necessary, “we will do the appropriate summaries.”
However, “at this minute we are extremely committed to being able to respond to the Comptroller’s Office in the shortest possible time because the Comptroller’s Office told us that it has 60 days. We received the report on April 1st, in the afternoon. And starting on April 2, we began holding quite extensive work meetings that have allowed us to have a degree of peace of mind regarding all the progress that the Agency’s internal teams have made in different departments and subdirectorates that have made great progress with respect to what the Comptroller’s Office was able to detect in 2022.”
Regarding the possibility of the information being submitted to the State Defense Council for a possible complaint, Pizarro insisted that the ANID is already responding to the observations.
“Yesterday we entered a series of documents into the Comptroller’s Office because the Comptroller’s Office asks that we prove that we have taken the actions, and that is done through a platform that the Comptroller’s Office has on a regular basis and you enter supporting documents regarding the observation, both you enter an accounting receipt, a collection letter, the judicial file, if applicable. And those are the documents that we already left yesterday entering the Comptroller’s Office.”
He added that it will continue like this throughout next week and that they hope to finish that within the next two weeks “because it is a lot of information.”
“For each of the observations we would upload, we calculate that at least one between five and ten documents must be uploaded for each observation. And so it is quite a document and our work plan is that we are going to finish before the deadline that the Comptroller’s Office established for us.”
“Cronyism” and “lack of control”
Finally, Pizarro also referred to the statements of Senator Alfonso de Urresti of the Senate Future Challenge Commission, who spoke of “cronyism” and “lack of control” on this issue.
“We have had several meetings with Senator Urresti who have expressed their concern about this. And given that, the same Senate Commission last year requested information from us regarding bankruptcy processes and the monitoring that people do. In all cases we responded to those letters and we responded to them from the bankruptcy process,” he stated.
The official insisted that the scholarships are awarded through competitions that are governed by bases and are public.
“We have platforms where applications are made, those who apply must meet a series of requirements. Evaluations are done by people external to the agency. After that, rankings are generated and based on the rankings, the awards are made depending on the budgetary availability we have. Therefore, here I cannot speak of cronyism, but rather of quite transparent bankruptcy processes,” he declared.
“What is happening? We have applicants who prepare their applications well in advance and also regarding scholarships we do some targeting. And that is super important because we provide the information in advance. There is a deadline for this. The Comptroller’s Office has previously carried out some audits of scholarships and has never observed the bankruptcy processes.”
Pizarro indicated that they sent this information to the Commission and Senator De Durresti.
“Our processes are quite robust and additionally when working on budget laws, when there is concern regarding this matter, we have always been very willing not only to provide the information but also to make available in our budget glosses that establish information conditions. ”, he concluded.
