Digital Transformation Ministry Before the Auditors: 16 Buildings Worth One Denar Each, 43% of Jobs Vacant

The ministry in charge of digitising the state cannot prove with documents which buildings it owns. That's not the opposition's conclusion - it's the State Audit Office's, in its final report on the core budget of the Ministry of Digital Transformation for 2024.

The most striking finding: 16 commercial buildings recorded at a value of one denar each, with incomplete documentation. Meanwhile, the asset register contains an entry called "Buildings" worth 140.05 million denars, around 2.28 million euros. That's 92.29% of the total value of the ministry's buildings - and the auditors didn't receive a single document showing which buildings the sum actually refers to.

That's why the auditors issued no opinion on the financial statements: they couldn't obtain enough evidence that the figures were reliable. On the legality of operations, they gave a qualified opinion.

Empty offices, uninsured property

The list goes on. Around 44,400 euros was paid out for goods and services without any public procurement procedure. Liabilities to domestic suppliers at year end came to around 235,400 euros. Property and equipment weren't insured against fire, flood or theft, so any damage would fall on the budget. Buying insurance is only planned for 2026.

The staffing picture is even more telling. 43% of the positions in the job classification are vacant, four out of ten sectors have no head, and six units have not a single employee. The internal audit unit had just one person, an adviser still in training, and not one internal audit was carried out in the whole of 2024. So who exactly is overseeing the ministry that's supposed to modernise the entire administration?

Part of the problem stems from the split of the former Ministry of Information Society and Administration into two new institutions. After the split, no full inventory or division balance sheet was drawn up for the premises, equipment and archives. Office space of 908.48 square metres on Filip II Makedonski Street in Skopje, allocated in August 2024, has a property certificate but has been neither valued nor entered into the books.

The answer: "inherited"

The ministry says most of the problems were inherited from the former ministry and built up over years, some for more than a decade. According to them, no full inventory of assets had been done in the last ten years, and the one-denar buildings are "an example of inherited and disorderly records", not their real market value. They put the staff shortage down to the gap between public-sector and private-sector IT salaries.

Maybe so. But the audit covers 2024, when the new ministry already existed. If an institution doesn't know what's in its own books, how much trust should anyone have in it digitising everyone else's?