News
Madrid's large municipalities lack sufficient means to scrutinise their accounts
Keeping track of how public money is spent has become a difficult task for many of the large councils in the Community of Madrid. Móstoles, Alcalá de Henares, Alcorcón, Fuenlabrada, Leganés and Torrejón de Ardoz are among the municipalities where the teams responsible for scrutinising the accounts consider their resources insufficient. Madrid city is the great exception.
The regional Cámara de Cuentas paints a picture of a widespread problem: 82.1% of municipal oversight bodies say they do not have sufficient human and material resources to carry out their work properly. Nearly three out of four have also brought this shortfall before their respective plenary sessions, without that making it possible to resolve it.
The pressure has increased over the years. Staffing levels have barely grown while municipal budgets and the volume of cases have multiplied. The management linked to the European Next Generation funds has also been added to the usual tasks, requiring additional controls and increasing the burden on already small teams.
Pinto offers one of the clearest examples. Its audit department has maintained virtually the same staffing level for three decades, a situation that has contributed to delays in submitting the internal control reports for 2023 and 2024. The problem, however, is far from being limited to a single municipality.
In 2025, only half of the audit bodies analysed produced their annual internal control report. Fewer than a quarter submitted an annual financial control plan and barely one in ten approved action plans aimed at correcting the shortcomings found. They are documents with little visibility for residents, but essential for knowing how the municipal budget is contracted, paid and executed.
Outside the city of Madrid, these units have an average of only five workers and nearly 20% of posts are vacant. Leganés, Pozuelo de Alarcón and Getafe are among the municipalities with the lowest proportion of filled posts relative to their population, forcing small teams to oversee increasingly complex administrations.
The Cámara de Cuentas calls for strengthening both the independence and the technical capacity of these bodies and increasing the number of civil servants and support staff. It also recalls that town councils can resort to agreements with the Intervención General del Estado to receive assistance when their own resources are insufficient.
The shortage ends up having effects beyond accounting. Reports that arrive late, controls that are not carried out with the intended depth or problems that take longer to be detected affect contracts, services and decisions that form part of everyday life in each municipality. The figure reveals a striking gap within the region: the more Madrid’s cities grow, the harder it becomes for their oversight mechanisms to grow at the same pace.