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.
