The State Audit Office (SAO) today published the Audit Report on the work of the Fund for Innovation and Technological Development (FITD) for 2022 for the period from 2019 to 2021. With the performed audit, certain undefined activities and inconsistencies with the strategic, normative acts and established policies from innovation activity were determined, SAO informs.

FITD spent 750,000 euros for hiring external collaborators in the period from 2019 to 2021, and 250,000 euros for hiring experts who were supposed to evaluate the projects, and even they, as experts, did not pass the testing and interview process.

The audit concluded that in the period 2019-2021, FITD hired experts to evaluate and provide expert opinions on the projects from the published public calls for financial support, for which funds were paid in a total amount of about 16 million denars. FITD has not undertaken any activities for the categorization of the registered experts in appropriate sections in the Register from which the experts will be selected according to a rotation system, no Commission for the evaluation of the experts has been established, no action has been adopted for the work of the Commission and there is no testing and interview for the evaluation of the experts, based on which the list with the ordinal numbers of the experts registered in the Register will be updated.