Covid in Austria: Court of Audits Declares 'Pandemic Handling' a Trainwreck--to the tune of 47.7b Euros

Guess what: it looks as if this is alright, but there is no more sense of shame, owning one's mistakes, or admission of mistakes

Apr 05, 2023

All that’s left to do is this: if you do read German, please venture over to the Court of Audit’s (Rechnungshof, the Gov’t Accountability Office in US parlance) report. Entitled, ‘Covid-19: Recommendations [Lessons Learned] from the Pandemic’, the summary (p. 11) reads as follows:

What worked:
Health-care system did not collapse
Continued functioning of state institutions
Rapid implementation of individual measures
Stabilisation of the labour market
What did not work:
Limited availability of information of medical care and utilisation of health services
Outdated legal basis and emergency planning
Lack of cross-departmental cooperation and inappropriate structures for delivery of gov’t programmes
Lack of controlling
Insufficiently conceptualised realisation of newly-established support services [incl. payouts], lack of accuracy in delivery of support

To me, this reads like lots of essential things that didn’t exactly work out, ranging from abuse by both the legislature and the executive branches, an inability of delivering targeted measures, little to no oversight (here’s looking at you, legacy media and the judiciary), and significant shortfalls in carrying out these gov’t measures.

In all, the price tag is astounding: per 31 Dec. 2022, the Austro-Covidian gov’t paid out 47.7 billion euros. For a country of approx. 9m inhabitants.

As a thought experiment: if the 330m US citizens would have experienced comparable largesse, the price tag would be in the ballpark of around US$ 1.75 trillion.

Shudder.

Note, specifically, that the Court of Audits specifically excluded assessments of the following items (although they will be analysed at a later point in time, presumably when no-one is paying attention anymore):

testing, school [closures] during the pandemic, vaccine procurement, hardship fund for agriculture and federal COVID-19 procurement [which was outsourced to a dedicated black hole named ‘COFAG’, a specifically created limited liability company…]

Here’s how media in Austro-Covidistan is talking about this (my translations, emphases):

State Broadcaster ORF: ‘Lessons Learned’, 4 April 2023

‘I understand the Court of Audit’s [CoA] contribution to be the identification of potential for improvement’, says CoA President Margit Kraker in the foreword. The CoA has already published 18 reports on the topic of the Coronavirus Pandemic and several more are in progress. Recommendations for [future] pandemic management are now available, as well as on an effective control system and a crisis-proof organisation.

In reports on the first year of the pandemic, the CoA found that preparations for public health pandemic management were inadequate, although the need for action had already been pointed out before the pandemic.

Criticism of Outdated Laws and Plans

There is criticism, for example, of the legal situation: the Epidemics Act and the National Pandemic Preparedness Plan from 2006 are no longer up-to-date, according to the Court of Audit. The auditing body therefore recommends that appropriate legal bases and contingency plans be put in place. [this is a thinly veiled threat that stuff, such as the WHO Pandemic Treaty and the updated Int’s Health Regulations are still on the books, in addition to corresponding domestic enabling legislation]

Functioning reporting systems are necessary, and there is also a need for clearly regulated interaction between the Ministry of Health, hospitals and the general practice sector. A general regulatory framework for information sharing and cooperation in the event of a crisis was lacking. [this means: reporting systems aren’t working]

At the end of March, experts also criticised the data management and especially the lack of data linkage to ORF.at. With data on the correlation of disease progression and health status as well as socio-economic indicators, there would also have been a better basis for weighing the benefits vs. disadvantages of school closures, for example, said complexity researcher [sic] Peter Klimek [note, briefly, that the issue of school mandates was specifically excluded from the CoA’s report, i.e., it’s unclear why Mr. Klimek and ORF brought this up here…]. He spoke of a ‘digitalisation backlog in the health system’ and that these ‘considerable gaps’ are not specifics of the Covid data but exist in general. [in other words: more and more digitisation, not less, is what is being pushed; note, as an aside, that Mr. Klimek is on the record informing everyone that the fourth round of lockdowns lacked any evidentiary basis and were, in his words, ‘a lap of honour’]

For simulation researcher Niki Popper [Covidistan’s premier modeller who was wrong about virtually everything], too, the main problem with Covid data is its still decentralised collection: ‘We need solutions on how to securely bring together the fragmented areas in the health system for concrete questions.’ [do ‘we’? And: who is ‘we’?]

Clearer Funding Aims

Meanwhile, the Court of Audits also took a close look at financial aid measures. 47.7 billion euros had been disbursed or appropriated by the federal government by the end of 2022, according to the CoA report. Of these, 14.3 billion euros were grants from the specially founded aid agency COFAG [the gov’ts own LLC to prevent parliamentary oversight, I’d argue], 9.8 billion euros went to finance furlough compensation [Kurzarbeit].

Recommendations of the CoA include a clear definition of responsibilities, funding goals and parameters, the accurate design of support measures, and the precise definition of funding criteria. For example, the criteria for COFAG's business assistance were partly imprecise, and applying companies did not have to explain their inability to pay or a concrete liquidity bottleneck for which the subsidies were intended. [see what I mean: all that’s essentially required was to send a two-liner asking for money, which was then granted, no strings attached: what could go wrong…?]

Moreover, the combination of business income replacement [via COFAG] and furlough compensation [paid out by another entity during the lockdowns] have not been ruled out, which, according to the Court of Audits, led to a ‘systematic over-subsidisation of personnel costs’. In November 2020 alone, this have caused excess subsidy payments of up to 29m euros for 50 selected large enterprises. [surprise…]

Gov’t Support: Lack of Systematic Oversight

The Court of Audit also criticised the lack of oversight of the subsidies. General eligibility requirements had not been systematically scrutinised; for example, in the case of family allowances, which continued to be granted without proof from the first pandemic months until March 2021. The CoA recommends that guidelines for the control of eligibility conditions be established, concepts for downstream control be developed, and the transparency of the subsidy payouts be ensured. [while this may be called means-testing, it also shows how broken the current system is]

Even in crisis situations, continuous operations must be guaranteed; the CoA referred to the lack of IT security of public administration employees in home offices as a prime example. According to the Court of Audit, existing expertise and structures in the administration should also be used and knowledge transfer ensured in the case of external commissions. [a veritable laundry list of things that did not work]

This was not carried out appropriately in the case of the COFAG, for which, according to the CoA, vast amounts of external services had to be acquired, especially for legal advice and the review of grant applications. By mid-2022, costs of around 36m euros had accrued. [I almost ‘wonder’ who these contracts went to…in Vienna, the mandatory PCR testing company, Lifebrain, had excellent ties to the state gov’t…just sayin’…]

FPÖ and NEOS see themselves vindicated

NEOS Secretary General and Parliamentary Audit Committee Chair Douglas Hoyos sees his party vindicated by the paper: ‘Our criticism of the imprecise subsidies and overfunding of COFAG is now proven in black and white by the Court of Audit’, they relayed via a press statement. He called on the government, which had ‘aimlessly distributed tax money with a watering can’, to take the CoA report seriously.

FPÖ chairman Herbert Kickl also saw his party vindicated: The Court of Audit ‘once again proves the FPÖ right’, he said in a statement. Every criticism of the federal government's failure voiced by the Freedom Party was substantiated in the paper. Kickl also complained that the other parliamentary parties were vehemently refusing to deal with the points—now also criticised by the Court of Audit—by refusing to convene a parliamentary investigative committee [Untersuchungsausschuss].

Interlude: a brief note on cognitive dissonance as we segway to the reporting (ahem) conducted—performed—by the Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s leading tabloid. They are at least a bit more honest about what the Court of Audit’s report actually mean:

Corona was a ‘Complete Failure on all Levels’, Krone, 4 April 2023

25 audits by the Court of Audit deal with the management of the pandemic. The final report, however, does not leave a good mark on the authorities. And this despite the fact that 47.7 billion euros were spent.

To begin with: it was a difficult time for all of us. For years we struggled through tests, vaccination, home office and homeschooling, furloughed employment, too many lockdowns, and more or less severe infections with the Coronavirus. In all fairness, it must also be conceded to the authorities that not every single one of the government’s decisions was taken lightly.

Nevertheless, the Court of Audit (CoA) is now raising eyebrows with a nearly 60-page report on ‘Recommendations from the Pandemic’. Step by step, the measures taken by the federal government, the Länder [states], and municipalities were examined. With a rather sobering conclusion.

After all, father state spent 47.7 billion euros on aid in connection with Covid-19 until the end of 2022. According to the Court of Audit, the room for manoeuvre for future crises is limited. The country’s debt increased to an estimated 353.2 billion euros. In 2019, it was still 280.5 billion.

Dated Epidemic Laws, No Central Crisis Management

It is obvious that not all of the—and that’s a positive aspect—very quickly implemented measures have also justifiably done what was needed. The inadequate staffing of specialised departments is criticised, as is the failure to re-staff the Directorate General of Public Health [a section of the Health Ministry]. A centralised national crisis management never existed. The Epidemics Act (from 1913) and the National Pandemic Preparedness Plan (2006) were also described as outdated.

There was complete chaos in the Epidemiological Notification System (EMS) [Austria’s outsourced federal electronic health registry]. County authorities responsible for contact tracing resorted to their own IT. This resulted in two reporting systems, hence the numbers of infected people differed almost daily.

How Many Hospital Beds were Actually Available?

A devastating picture also emerges with regard to information on occupancy in the hospitals as well as with respect to the lack of overview of, or a solution for, existing protective equipment and its storage. According to the Court of Audit, the health insurance funds had no overview of which surgeries were postponed and which ones were not. [I suppose this would end the ‘let’s socialise medicine’ debates in, say, the US, because, as the record shows, gov’t-run models aren’t ‘better’; they are simply ‘different’ in their inadequacy; see here for the Norwegian report criticising essentially the same problems]

The lack of time during the crisis also led to subsidy chaos. For example, three ministries were responsible for the hardship fund, and artists also received subsidies from three different funds. Companies that were hardly affected by furloughed employment received 500m euros too much. Family allowances were also paid to children who were already adults and working, as well as to families who had moved abroad.

There is harsh criticism for inadequate controls of the paid sums, such as the 14.3 billion euros in business subsidies. According to the Court of Audit, we must be much better prepared for possible future pandemics.

Bottom Lines

There is much more to say about all of this, but the best way of putting this is:

Those who go to sleep in a democracy will likely wake up in a dictatorship.

Conveyed to US parlance:

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

We have not been vigilant, and the ‘pandemic’ is but a catalyst, i.e., something that speeds up already existing processes and dynamics. I’ve written about these issues elsewhere and here: