Les chambres régionales des comptes

THE STATE AND TERRITORIAL PUBLIC MANAGEMENT : A DELEGATION OF POWERS AND MEANS TOGETHER WITH A PERMANENCE OF THE MODE OF FINANCIAL AND BUDGETARY CONTROL

[1) The remanence of the central eye on the territorial funds

Close friends mechanisms of co-operation remain between the local executives and the administrative services is often intimate, not to say organic.

In fact for example the tax services which communicate the evolution of the bases and the tax rates or the accountants of the Treasury can carry out financial studies. It is still the Directorate-General of the Local Communities (DGCL) which provides quantified tables or ratios fixing of the average main roads by type of community and demographic layer, of which the use in particular makes it possible to prepare the technical assembly of the draft budget. But the State also intervenes, as we saw, in order to provide various advances or of the exceptional subsidies.

It is the case of the free advances on the rates, after opinion of the Treasurer General Payer (TPG) on the communes and by the Minister for Finance on proposal of the Prefect and opinion of the TPG in the case of the departments and the areas.

It is the case also advances for assistances of treasury or exceptional subsidies, mainly for the benefits of the communes, by the ministry for the interior. The State authorizes facilities of treasury indeed. With regard to the payment of the resources, it plays the part of farmer general and of banker and it regulates the amounts of the equipments and subsidies which it grants to the local communities according to variable methods'.

It ensures the tax collection of the rates ; deals with the difference between the amounts of the roles and the actually boxed amount. It is a banker because it makes advances on receipts by using the procedure of the accounts of advances of the separate accounts of the treasure.

With regard to the equipments and subsidies : the Total Equipment of Operation is monthly versed; the Total Equipment of Equipment is poured per quarter for the communes and the departments ; the FCTVA is versed at the beginning of the year following the vote of the administrative account.

However, the treasury of the local communities remains managed by the services of the State. Indeed, there remains an obligation of deposits of the funds to the Treasury, even if there are two possibilities of employment of the free funds going up with a circular of March 5, 1926 known as « Doumer- Chautemps « , confirmed by a circular of the Director of the Public accounts of Dec. 18, 1990, namely the budgetary placements and the placements of treasury.

Of or the temptation of the recourse at third organizations in order to escape the obligation from the deposit to the treasure. That can be the use of Mixed investment and public office Company of HLM, even the existence of organization satellites created ad hoc.

[2) An obliged partnership

In addition, the European subsidies, whose object is to compensate for structural economic imbalances, forward by the administrative services of the area and in particular by the secretariat-general of action regional (SGAR).

Lastly, in particular because of the criteria of convergences imposed by adhesion on the mechanisms of the European Union, the State and the local communities become partners in order to control the public expenditure : in 1996, there was conclusion of a pact of stability of the financial relations between the State and the local communities intended to control the evolution of the principal contests known as active. In 1999-2001, it is the contract of growth and solidarity providing that the equipments included/understood in its normalized perimeter evolve/move according to indices made up of the consumer price index except tobacco.

As Patrice Duran underlines it, « Cofinancing, partnership and contractualisation constitute more and more the pillars of the territorial management of the public affairs, which ratifies the fact that to control is well business of collective action and that there is mutualisation of the resources like risks »^27(*).

The rights and freedoms of the local authorities are thus limited by the organic mechanisms of financial solidarity. There are truly mutualisation of the resources and transfers of financial resources, whereas the State preserves an important weight in the system.

The decisional places split up on the whole of the territory, according to a logic of polycentricity. For as much, according to description to which we proceeded, there is not, strictly speaking, of die connection between the center and the periphery, but a reformulation of the modes of co-operation and organization.

Mode of the supervision, the system evolved to more decentralized and more diversified controls, respecting however, in other forms, the traditional problems.

* ²⁷ P. Duran, «  Public action, political action  », duplicated course ENS Cachan, 2000-2001.