Humberto Vacaflor writes in El Diario:

ECONOMY AND FINANCE

Audit to the INE

Private entrepreneurs want an international organization to audit the INE, beginning by reviewing the GDP growth data, on which the payment of the second Christmas bonus depends.

Of course, the national authorities responded with indignation, saying that this will not be possible, suggesting that the data handled by the National Institute of Statistics are sacrosanct.

The economist Gonzalo Chávez has observed, in a column of opinion, that some data on which the INE based its reports on the growth of the first quarter of that year are wrong. The INE gives positive results that are negative.

The agricultural, one of the thirteen sectors that includes the calculation, says the economist, had grown by 8.6 percent in that period last year but in the first quarter of this year only grew by 6.6 percent. That is to say that in this year it grew 2 percent less than last year and yet, the INE says that the first quarter of that year there was a greater growth.

An audit would serve to detect who is right, whether the INE or private entrepreneurs. But, as we are, it may be advisable to conduct a full audit, including the management of state resources in these years in which the Comptroller was virtually on a sabbatical decade and the INE was entertained saying that inflation did not grow, contradicting the predominant feeling in the market.

An audit of YPFB could discover why the company produces less and less hydrocarbons and has fewer and fewer gas and oil reserves, despite the cheerful reports given by the minister of the sector, who believes that all this is a carnival.

An audit of the management of gas reserves could explain why one does not really know how much gas Bolivia has and if it is enough for domestic consumption and to comply with export contracts.

Minister Luis Sánchez, in effect, assures that the natural gas reserves, which are not reported since 2013, are 132 TCF, while the Spanish Antonio Brufau, of Repsol, estimates that they only reach 11 TCF, that is already an exaggeration regarding the calculations made by very serious experts, who speak of 4 TCF.

The dramatic thing would be an audit of the investments made by YPFB, which total more than $2,000 million dollars, without any benefit. According to Siglo 21, at this time YPFB is bidding on a recycling service for urea that was hydrated in the same Bulo Bulo plant due to inappropriate and too prolonged storage, as a result of the lack of a transport system.

An audit of the lost decade is needed.

http://www.eldiario.net/noticias/2018/2018_08/nt180810/economia.php?n=20&-auditoria-al-ine