Editorial: «beer and wine audit» makes embarrassing history

Photo: Arno Saar / Õhtuleht

Browsing the Estonian Development Fund «beer and wine audit» is first and foremost embarrassing. Let’s not forget: this is a legal person governed by public law, the spirit and basis for activities of which Riigikogu wrote into a specific law. The fund’s money comes from Estonian state.

The spending habits of no agency, institution or a state-owned company may be in glaring contradiction with the culture we generally expect from representatives of public authority. Anyone with wits will understand an agency has expenses. As understandably, somewhere we draw the decency line. This line, new Development Fund council crossed at the end of this July.

Over the years, the rather generous salaries at the fund have been publicly justified by the need to pay competitive wages to people in the highly salaried financial realm. The competitive sums thus staring at us from the annual accounts.

Now, in an internal audit summary we read that on top of all that, in the name of a good working environment, a great necessity has arisen on a Friday night to go get beer and pizza by fund’s credit card. Do we really, in all earnestness, need to ponder the expediency of such expenses? Okay, a benevolent judge will easily imagine a brainstorming session going into the late hours where food and drink have their proper place. Even so, some simple questions do pop up. With such high paid people, can’t they throw in a couple of euros each? And did they never stop to think that, sooner or later, a state-created agency’s expenses will meticulously be made public? Every bite and gulp up for general criticism. If a private entrepreneur does this kind of spending, the taxman may afterwards ask if these were indeed business costs and file a claim a posteriori.    

Altogether justified, also, are the questions about answerability of council members. Members of Development Fund council are appointed by Riigikogu (5), the government (2) and rectors of public law based universities (2). According to all appearances, this might be a bunch able to set strategic goals for the fund while keeping an eye on its activities – even if for the sake of swiftly applying brakes to splurging unfit for Estonian public culture.

In Estonia, it usually happens that while appointing people to councils, they go for broadness of representation and the very council not to be paid too much. The result being that often the councils are no match for the well-paid board and the councillors, even while people fitting in every way, are not motivated to put time into strategic management of the agencies in question.

The «beer and wine audit» is for history books, but a question far more important awaits an answer: what about the fund, now? What do we do with it? What are the plans of its present council and board?