HIBAPRESS
The financial courts issued 4,452 final decisions and rulings related to auditing and accounting, distributed between 4,235 decisions and rulings of exoneration (95 percent) and 217 decisions and rulings (5 percent) of deficit in the accounts of the concerned accountants with a total amount of 57,882,097.54 dirhams.
The annual report of the Supreme Court of Accounts for the period 2024-2025 stated that the deficit amounts resulting from the failure to take the required measures by the accountant in the field of resource collection constituted 95 percent of these amounts, while the deficit amounts related to the validity of the expenditure did not exceed 5 percent. According to the report, the limited percentage of deficit amounts, related to the validity of expenditure, and the high percentage of decisions and rulings of exoneration, are due to the positive impact of the information systems that have been adopted in the field of expenditure implementation, especially the integrated expenditure management system, which enhanced the prevention of errors in settlement accounts and the pedagogical impact of publishing the rules derived from the decisions and rulings issued by the financial courts. The same source highlighted that this situation raises the problem of the effectiveness of the audit, investigation, and accounting procedure with regard to monitoring the validity of expenditure, in view of the cost of the procedure and the limited nature of the current liability system in light of the developments that public management has witnessed, especially following the increasing recourse to digitization and the reforms brought by the organic law for finance laws aimed at the transition from an approach to management based on means to an approach based on results. He clarified that the financial courts recorded the recovery of a total amount of 16,433,633.29 dirhams by the concerned bodies, following the receipt of memos of observations or preliminary decisions by the concerned public accountants, i.e., before the issuance of final decisions on the concerned accounts. As for the field of discipline related to the budget and financial affairs, the report adds, the financial courts ruled during 2024 and until the end of September 2025 on the responsibility of 99 individuals, where a fine was imposed totaling 4,139,000 dirhams in 72 files and the return of the amounts corresponding to the losses caused by the violations committed in nine files out of the seventy-two files mentioned, totaling 1,151,676.40 dirhams, while it was ruled that the charges were not proven in 27 files. It was noted that the violations proven in total, according to the results of the deliberations, are due to imbalances at the level of the internal control system, the lack of coordination between departments, the limited human resources, the lack of familiarity with the regulatory texts related to public tenders, and the constraints resulting from the delay in the adoption of the budget and the urgent need in some cases for services to ensure the continuity of the public utility. With regard to the bodies subject to the ongoing cases, public institutions constituted 80 percent of them at the council level and the communities, 89 percent of them for the regional councils of accounts. As for the categories of individuals being followed, the Supreme Court of Accounts clarified that a total of 63 individuals were followed within the framework of the ongoing cases before the court during 2024 and until the end of September 2025, where the category of officials, spending officers, and assistant spending officers constituted 46 percent of them. As for the regional councils of accounts, 332 individuals were followed within the framework of the ongoing cases before them, where the heads of the territorial communities and the bodies emanating from them constituted 47 percent of them. The report indicated that the financial courts recorded that a group of concerned bodies, before initiating the legal procedures that would raise the responsibility of the concerned public administrators, which may be costly, initiated corrective measures that had a positive financial impact (estimated at 629.2 million dirhams), in addition to other effects of an administrative, environmental, or social nature. He stressed that the financial courts take into account, when preparing requests to raise cases, the balance between the cost of the procedure and the financial stakes related to the discovered actions, and also consider the effectiveness of the procedure to correct the registered imbalances, especially if the matter concerns individual actions that are not of a recurring or serious nature or that have not resulted in damage, compared to the other means available to them, which are issuing recommendations or urgent memos or sending letters to the officials of the concerned bodies or exercising disciplinary action by informing the authority that has the right to discipline the concerned parties of the actions that may warrant disciplinary punishment or taking measures during supervisory missions. The financial courts also take into account, when requesting the raising of cases, the received complaints, but the complaints processed by these courts showed upon their study that more than 95 percent of them do not contain any serious elements to raise the responsibility of the accused persons. The Supreme Court of Accounts pointed out that a part of the 2024-2025 annual report was allocated to presenting the most important conclusions derived from the judgments and decisions issued by the financial courts, through which the council aims to clarify the legal provisions applied to a group of operations related to public management, and to highlight the violations that would raise the responsibility of public administrators, with the aim of drawing attention to the actions that involve violations of the rules of good management of the public utility. On another level, he clarified that the Attorney General at the Supreme Court of Accounts referred to the Attorney General at the Court of Cassation – Head of the Public Prosecution – twenty (20) files concerning actions that may warrant a criminal penalty. These files concerned 13 territorial communities, four (04) public institutions, a facility of the state (01), a public company (01), and one association (01).
