Supreme Audit Office of the Slovak Republic

Bratislava, April 14, 2023 – The state should consider how it will protect key objects, not only from the point of view of property protection, but also because of the security of their information systems. In Slovakia, in the past, this segment was significantly commercialized and private security services began to ensure the protection of the buildings of important state institutions. "Even for the discriminatory use of the so-called certificate of the C4 integrator in public procurement, private security services with dubious personnel and financial cover were awarded state contracts", pointed out the President of the Supreme Audit Office (SAO) Ľubomír Andrassy in connection with the conclusions of the audit focused on this issue. The head of the Slovak national auditors informed the supreme constitutional officials about its result, as well as the result of the other eight audit activities completed in the first quarter of this year - President Zuzana Čaputová, Speaker of the Parliament Boris Kollár and Acting Prime Minister Eduard Heger.

Despite the fact that public administration organizations and business companies with state ownership spend relatively high financial resources on the protection of property and persons, no one examines the legitimacy and purpose of their use. There is no authority in Slovakia that would be authorized to collect information about concluded contracts and agreed activities in the field of security services. Nor is there a uniform procedure that would guide public administration organizations in the procurement of this type of service. "The whole system is unclear, public procurements were non-transparent in the past, there are historical contracts for an indefinite period, but also contracts where there are indications that the costs were underestimated in order to obtain the contract and then adjust the real financial performance with various supplements," the President of the Supreme Audit Office  pointed out to other problems. The costs for one person-hour of an SBS (Private Security Service) employee, which were contractually agreed, did not even reach the standard values ??calculated by the Slovak Chamber of Private Security Services for the given calendar year.

The full text of the press release about this issue in Slovak language is available here. Use the Google icon in the top bar for automatic translation.