“Eight days of license” to be eliminated, “selection of expensive citizens”: ten days after the publication of a parliamentary report on the same subject, the operation of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (EESC) is expanded again in a final report of the auditors court published this Friday, believing that it cannot “leave out of efforts (budgets).”
The EESC, born in 1946, has 175 advisors, including 52 employee representatives, such as many companies, 45 under associative life and 26 under the defense of the environment from the reform in 2021.
The Auditors Court welcomes the reduction in the number of EESC members by 25% (from 233 to 175), but this decrease “did not result in a budget economy for the State.” The magistrates believe that “in a context of degraded public finances, the EESC cannot be left out of the requested efforts of other public entities.”
“The Court had indicated during its last control that the regime of the organization of working time did not comply with the legal work time of 1,607 hours per year. Despite the law of transformation of the public service, the EESC did not review this regime. In total, it is 8 days of license that should be eliminated,” added the auditing court.
Citizen conventions: selections of “expensive” citizens
In addition, if its role in the organization of citizen discourse was reinforced by the reform of 2021 and its reference, facilitated by the petition, remains that the EESC did not seize and its opinions remain confidential. On the organization of citizen conventions (climate, end of life or time of the child today), “the selection of citizens is expensive and can lead to bias related to volunteering,” the audit court still judges.
They also point out that the institution “leads most of its work within the framework of self-saisines (79% of its productions during the period)”, and little by reference to the government and Parliament (34 between 2019 and 2024), or by civic request. They also regret that “the state methods of financing of the citizen participation of the EESC (4.2 million euros per year) have evolved, going from dedicated financing (…) to funds integrated in the state declaration to the EESC, without the real capacity of this address to follow its consumption.”
A few days ago, a parliamentary report denounced the “too low investment” of the EESC members with “few publications” and a “very low number of audiences” carried out. “
Source: BFM TV
