Les chambres régionales des comptes

THE ORGANIZATION INTERNS ROOM

[1) The diary : programming of controls and rationalization of the means

The programming of controls is a delicate exercise insofar as it must guarantee impartiality and equal treatment for each controlled. Guy Piolé stresses that « the decree of August 23 ratified a procedure of development of the checking routines, which must give place to an annual decision of the president of the room, taken after opinion of the public ministry and consultation of the room itself, in plenary formation ».

To be more precise, it is to the president of the CRC that falls to define the organization and the annual program of work of its room, like the distribution of the lists of organizations and communities to be controlled.

« Among the requirements, to judge the accounts within a reasonable time ..... For that, we assert ourselves four-year programming. We also have the will of a certain harmonization of our controls with those of the other rooms. For that, we refer to work of commissions or committees gathering of the members of the Court or the rooms which work out guides of control. We thus treat topics such as those related, for example, with the territorial personnel, such or such aspect of management of the hospitals and soon with that of the intercommunality installation by reference to the law Chevènement : legal aspects of the transfers of competences, financial aspects of these transfers. »^37(*)

The role of the President is important here since it with faculty to ratify or controls it management of a community being able to occur with some encablures of an electoral expiry conditioning the renewal of the mandate of the elected official in question. The programming of the rooms can thus recover if necessary a strategic character for the controlled entities and, for this reason, it formally engages the whole of the magistrates of the room. This possibility of irruption of a magistrate, in full electoral cycle, pushed the senators to propose a six months deadline of neutrality no letter of final observation could not be sent to a director^38(*).

The model of the geographical competence of the sections or the magistrates is frequent but nonexclusive. This model schematically consists in allotting territories to each magistrate. There are indeed different distributions, according to the nature of the controlled organizations (hospital section, section secondary/higher education) or according to the nature of the accomplished missions (budgetary control for one, jurisdictional for the other).

In addition, « for a good part of our investigations, to only work does not have a direction and it is interesting to work with others.... Ca results initially in a work on the programming which begins in n-1 between all the presidents of regional room... the 25... with the presidents of room of the Court who are 7. Work being prepared by a committee of connection, which functions to him uninterrupted, which must meet once a month, and which is in charge of the coordination of the investigations »^39(*). Moreover, the President of the room can give the tone : « I push them to make programming horizontal, regional, in order to have comparative data on comparable organizations... For example, several school establishments »^40(*)

The allocation of the duties between sections and the assignment of the magistrates and assistants in their center fall within the competence of the president of the room, through his organisational decisions. Thus, in certain CRC, the program a distribution per quarter indicates. Certain magistrates also prefer to start with the large accounts in order to finish in a lighter way. There can be also, as one saw, of cuttings by sector or department.

The problems of sectoral specialization run up however against the necessary versatility to evolve/move, face the unforeseen related ones to the loads of the room or the mobility of the magistrates. The rate/rhythm of the budgetary controls or sasines and the reasoned requests can be eminently variable, since they can emanate several sides, and thus weigh on the annual volume of a room.

There can also be departure not compensated of certain advisers as the investigations inter-rooms produce effects on the calendars of the CRC^41(*).

* ³⁷ Extracts of the discussion with Mr. Pagès, President de Section with the regional room of High-Normandy.

* ³⁸ This proposal is included in particular in the senatorial Report/ratio relating to the regional rooms of the accounts published in 1998 and presented by J.P. Amoudry and J. Oudin.

* ³⁹ Extracts of the discussion with Mrs Lamarque, President of the regional room of High-Normandy.

* ⁴⁰ Extracts of the discussion with Mrs Lamarque, president of the regional room of High-Normandy.

* ⁴¹ Governed of Castelnau, legal consultant to the local communities, and Benedicte Boyer, evoked in the work  :  Portrait of the regional rooms of accounts, Decentralization and Local Development, LGDJ, 1997, concrete problems being posed with the activity of the rooms  : the calendars disturbed by the dubious rate/rhythm of the budgetary controls, the not-compensated departures of certain advisers, the interference of the investigations inter-rooms, but also rotations of the territorial interlocutors who weaken the capitalization of knowledge within the rooms.