- Almost sixty percent of federal spending is subsidies to cantons, municipalities, companies and private households.
- According to the Federal Audit Office (SFAO), not all of these financial aids are economical or appropriate. She recommends measures.
- According to the SFAO report published on Monday evening, the federal government spent 48.5 billion francs on subsidies in 2022. This corresponded to 59.7 percent of his total expenses.
Since the middle of the 20th century, the federal government has continuously increased its subsidy payments, wrote the SFAO, which regularly checks the effectiveness of financial aid from the various departments. For the latest report, financial control analyzed 36 of its own audit reports from 2018 to 2022.
The SFAO sees a lot of potential for improvement – both in the design and in the implementation and impact of subsidies, as it summarized. The legally stipulated conditions are not always adequately met in practice.
Goals not defined clearly enough
According to the SFAO, it has been repeatedly found that the subsidy offices pay too little attention to the recipients’ reasonable personal contributions. There are cases in which public money is used to subsidize activities that could also function without this support.
For this reason, the financial controllers of the Federal Finance Administration (FFA) recommend adapting their guidelines on subsidy reporting. For example, more emphasis should be placed on avoiding deadweight effects. The aim is for the EFV to take a closer look at the administrative units in the future.
In its report, the SFAO also criticized the fact that the objectives pursued by a subsidy are often not defined or not defined clearly enough to actually be able to check the effect of the subsidy. According to its own statements, the SFAO also observed several times that subsidized tasks were not clearly differentiated from other, non-subsidized services.
More appropriate monitoring of success required
The SFAO also identified potential for improvement in the supervision of the subsidy offices. “On the one hand, the cost calculations under subsidy law were sometimes incorrect, incomplete or not sufficiently transparent, which made supervision significantly more difficult. On the other hand, supervision should follow a more consistent risk orientation.”
The SFAO concluded that financial aid and compensation should be granted more uniformly and fairly and used more appropriately and efficiently. Subsidies must therefore be subject to appropriate performance monitoring and provide key figures to monitor whether targets have been achieved.
During the last comprehensive subsidy audit in 2008, the Federal Council estimated the financial relief potential at over 100 million francs. “Due to the lack of political will in parliament, the expected relief could only be achieved for just under a fifth of the subsidies,” says the SFAO’s current report.
The federal government uses subsidies to promote activities outside the federal administration that contribute to achieving a social or political goal but would hardly be noticed without these subsidies. The legal basis is the Subsidy Act.