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NEWS
State Comptroller Report for 2000
by Yated Ne'eman Staff

State Comptroller and National Ombudsman Eliezer Goldberg presented the Knesset on Monday with the second part of the annual State Comptroller's report for 2000, Report 51B, and the annual National Ombudsman's Report for 2000. The State Comptroller's report points to numerous deficiencies and irregularities in government ministries, but found no criminal activity.

In the report, Goldberg also deals with a number of general issues not directly related to specific ministries, such as troubled youth, violence in schools, ministers' trips abroad, acceptance of gifts by ministers and senior civil servants and earthquake readiness. The report also deals with some 60 subjects involving 17 ministries.

Goldberg noted that public servants and elected officials should serve as role models where public spending is concerned. He said that the subject of expenditures abroad by ministers and their retinues must be regulated. There is currently no ceiling on minister's expense accounts, no separation between personal expenses and those of the entourage and too many frivolous and personal expenses charged to government expense accounts.

Goldberg called for a reduction in physical and verbal violence in Israeli society.

Goldberg noted that the report shows that government ministries do not cooperate with one another, and that there has been no improvement in this area, adding that as National Ombudsman, he dealt with 6,600 complaints last year, a significant increase compared to the year before -- 5,250 complaints. He noted that 37 percent of the complaints were found to be justified, a fact indicative of the quality of the service government authorities give citizens.

The State Comptroller report included the following points, among others:

1. Irregularities and deficient supervision of travel arrangements by civil servants and their expenditures abroad.

2. Discrimination in grants given to student delegations traveling to Poland.

3. Deficient information about gifts received by prime ministers before 1995.

4. Trauma victims were moved from one hospital to another in a manner that could have endangered their health.

5. Government decisions to prepare for the possibility of an earthquake were not carried out.

6. The Vilnai committee recommendations concerning violence in schools were not implemented.

7. A recommendation to weigh combining the police prosecution with the criminal prosecution.

The striking Absence of Thousands of State Gifts

The police investigation into the gifts given to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has changed the norms in such matters for elected officials and civil servants, the State Comptroller reports.

By law, a public servant who gets a gift must report it to the Custodian General. The State Comptroller found that from 1980 to September 1999 -- almost 20 years -- only 310 gifts were reported to the Custodian General.

From September 1999 (when the Netanyahu probe began) to June 2000, 2,500 gifts were retroactively reported. The sudden, public investigation of Netanyahu apparently drove others.

The State Comptroller found the prime minister's office had no idea of the location of thousands of gifts received by prime ministers and senior figures in the prime minister's office before 1995, when record keeping began.

He noted that no gift to any serving prime minister in the past 20 years had been reported to the Custodian General as required by law.

The State Comptroller demands in his report that clear guidelines regarding gifts must be set down.

The State Comptroller notes that since 1994 the Internal Security ministry and the Israel Police generally reported gifts received. They, along with the Defense Ministry, the Israel Defense Forces and the Ministry of Tourism, were the only public offices with proper procedures for receiving gifts and other benefits.

No Earthquake Preparations

Though the government has made numerous decisions over the years aimed at better preparing the country to withstand an earthquake, not one of these decisions has ever been implemented, the Report found.

These include decisions to strengthen buildings holding large numbers of people, such as schools and hospitals, and buildings whose collapse would be especially catastrophic, such those where toxic materials are made or stored. This task was entrusted to the Housing Ministry, which has so far not reinforced a single building.

One of the more important ideas that has been neglected was that all master plans should take seismic considerations into account. In practice, only one of the 12 relevant plans does take such data into account. The most important of these plans -- Master Plan 35, which deals with all development in Israel through 2020 -- largely ignores seismic data.

Still another unimplemented decision was the cabinet's order to the Finance Ministry in 1990 to prepare a study on how the government should prepare to cope with the effects of an earthquake. The Ministry was supposed to submit its conclusions within a year; so far, it has not even begun work on the project.

Education Ministry Criticized for Inaction on School Violence

In an extensive look at violence in schools, the 2000 Report was critical of the Education Ministry for not doing enough to curb the phenomenon.

Proposals formulated by a public committee set up to examine ways of countering violence in schools two years ago, and chaired by Culture, Science and Sport Minister Matan Vilnai, were not adequately implemented by the Ministry.

The Ministry even failed to adopt some of the recommendations that did not pose any significant added financial burden. These included proposals for mandating that school principals report on violence to the ministry and for organizing violence-prevention programs.

The report shows that Israel tops an international list of youth violence in schools.

According to the report, at least half of the pupils in schools are exposed to acts of bullying, and a similar percentage has participated in acts of violence against their schoolmates. Twenty-five percent of the boys, and 10 percent of the girls in schools suffered some form of physical assault, while 23 percent of the boys and seven percent of the girls admitted to carrying weapons in school for self-defense.

One of the problems highlighted by the Comptroller's report is the failure of school principals to report acts of violence to the Education Ministry. The report states that school administrators "are in denial on the problem of violence in schools and are adopting an attitude that there is no violence in their schools."

During 1999, violent incidents in schools increased by 25 percent. The Comptroller discovered in his report that the Education Ministry does not collate the data from various sources throughout the country into a national data bank.

The schools have also failed to adopt the Vilnai committee's call for programs for the prevention of violence.

The Vilnai committee recommended increasing the number of counselors and psychologists in elementary schools and in Arab schools, because these are the schools where such expert advisers are in short supply.

Religious Council Irregularities

The budget for religious services is virtually nonexistent in Israel because 80 percent of the money allocated to the religious councils for this purpose is used to pay salaries, the State Comptroller's Report discovered.

The statistics of the Ministry regarding the number of positions and the overall allocations for wages in all of the religious councils in the year 2000, indicate that today, there are 147 council heads and deputies, whose aggregate salaries total NIS 58 million. There are 140 municipal rabbis whose wages total NIS 61 million. The statistics also indicate that the sum of the salaries of all of the employees of the religious councils, including retired workers and employed pensioners, is NIS 356 million a year, a sum which, in the opinion of the State Comptroller, is exaggerated and unjustified.

The Be'er Yaakov religious council, for instance, spent NIS 880,000 -- half of its total budget for 2000 -- on the salaries of the town's two rabbis. The Migdal Ha'emek religious council spent NIS 1 million a year on the salaries of the council head and his deputy -- NIS 400,000 more than the maximum permitted by civil service regulations.

The Even Yehuda religious council spent 100 percent of its NIS 1.8 million budget on various salaries.

Comptroller Eliezer Goldberg recommended that the Religious Affairs Ministry consider abolishing religious councils in small towns such as Givat Ada and Even Yehuda. He also recommended that such towns be served by a neighborhood or regional rabbi rather than a municipal rabbi, who receives a higher salary.

Goldberg also leveled harsh criticism at the management of the budget for religious structures (synagogues and mikvehs). This budget is jointly controlled by the Religious Affairs, Interior and Housing Ministries. He found that the interministerial committee responsible for funding such structures made hundreds of allocations totaling NIS 70 million in violation of the law. Nor did the committee effectively supervise use of this funding.

The report says that there are very serious shortcomings in all that is related to the appointments to the religious affairs councils. It states that need that three authorities: the religious affairs council, the local political authorities and the local rabbinates, should join together in order to constitute the Religious Affairs Council, has many pitfalls. The system -- a ministerial committee -- established by the Law for the Arbitration of Disputes Between the Three Authorities -- does not function effectively. As a result, many obstacles are preventing the renewal of the compositions of the majority of the religious affairs councils, even for many years.

In the opinion of the Office of the State Comptroller, the current procedure for assembling the composition of the religious affairs councils and the procedure for the election of municipal chief rabbis, accords unfit advantage to the party of the Religious Affairs Minister, and enables its representatives to seize power positions in the religious affairs councils. The report also states that there is no services-basket from which it will be possible to derive the level of the religious services which will provide for each religious council and its manpower forces, and also for all of the funds it needs, considering its size and the nature of the population requiring its services.

The activities of the religious councils are subsidized mainly by the Religious Affairs Ministry and the local councils, with each one of the these bodies making decisions according to different considerations. Every year, the Ministry determines the scope of the budgets of the religious affairs councils basing it, to a great extent, on past situations, and not on in-depth analysis of the needs. By the same token, the report determines that its decisions on the budget are very late and are made sometimes only at the end of the year.

The report noted that according to the data of the ministry, the total budget of all the religious councils was NIS 464 million in 2000, and the share of the Religious Affairs Ministry in that sum was NIS 148.5 million. The religious councils fund 20 percent of their expenses from their own incomes. 40 percent of the budgets of the religious councils (not including the part they fund themselves) is funded by the national government (within the framework of the Ministry's budget) and 60 percent is funded by the local councils. The share of the ministry in the expenses of the religious council in 1998 was NIS 155 million shekels, and in 1999, NIS 162 million.

Travel Abroad: Millions Over Budget

How much do trips abroad by civil servants cost the taxpayer each year? According to the State Comptroller's Report, nobody knows.

Official figures say that such trips cost NIS 14.5 million in 1998 and NIS 13 million in 1999. But these figures are certainly inaccurate, the Comptroller said, due to a combination of lax reporting by the various ministries and lax supervision by the Civil Service Commission.

Even when trips were reported, information about their cost was often left out, making it impossible to calculate the state's annual expenditures on such journeys. The Environment Ministry, for instance, reported the cost of trips financed by its trips budget, but not those financed under other budgetary line items. The Health Ministry sometimes reported estimated rather than actual costs.

The Comptroller's Report, which covered 1998 and 1999, also found that many trips were financed out of budgets not meant for this purpose. The Labor Ministry, for instance, exceeded its trips' budget by 201 percent in 1999, spending NIS 314,000 instead of NIS 104,000.

Trip reports filed with the Civil Service Commission often lacked crucial details, such as the purpose of the trip or the destination, in addition to price data, making it impossible to determine whether the trip was justified.

But despite the obvious importance of this data, the Comptroller said, the Civil Service Commission never asked the ministries to supply the missing information, nor did it demand explanations of seemingly unreasonable items.

The Commission also failed to investigate the sizable annual growth in the number of overseas trips since 1991, even though this growth was often clearly unjustified. The Education Ministry, for instance, financed more overseas trips in 2000 than it did in 1999, although its expenses should have gone down after the Culture and Sport Ministry was spun off from it in 1999.

In some cases, the Government paid workers' expenses for a few days after the conference they were attending had ended, thereby funding private vacations. In other cases, ministries paid far more than civil service regulations permit for workers' expenses overseas. In 1998, for instance, the Finance Minister's media adviser was lodged in a London hotel that cost 270 pounds sterling a night, when the official per diem allowance that year, including both food and lodging, was only 110 pounds. In the Health Ministry, several trips were approved retroactively.

The Prime Minister's Office has no mechanism at all for supervising the prime minister's expenditures overseas to determine whether they were justified. The report cited one 1998 visit to New York by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that cost $386,771, including $243,272 in hotel bills, and a dinner party given by then-prime minister Ehud Barak in Washington in 1999 that cost $52,876: including $1,889 just for flowers. In neither case was it possible to determine whether these expenditures were justified, the Comptroller said.

 

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