Parliament Approves the Court of Auditors Overhaul, Raising the Prior Clearance Threshold for Public Contracts to 7.5 Million Euros

Parliament approved the new law on the organisation and procedure of the Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors) in its final global vote on Wednesday 21 October. Public contracts will need the court's prior clearance, the visto prévio, only from 7.5 million euros, up from 750,000 euros today, with more of the scrutiny moved to checks during and after a contract's life.

PSD, CDS and Iniciativa Liberal voted in favour, Lusa reported. Chega, PCP, BE and two PS deputies voted against; the rest of the PS abstained, as did PAN, JPP and Livre. The vote is the next step in the reform our 4 October report followed, when the court's president, Filipa Urbano Calvão, said she might take it to the Constitutional Court.

What changes

The Government's original bill, approved by the Council of Ministers on 9 April, set the threshold at 10 million euros; the Government said that would exempt more than 90 percent of procedures. In committee on 13 October, a PSD amendment brought it down to 7.5 million euros, ECO reported. The current limit of 750,000 euros, excluding VAT, and 950,000 euros for related contracts, was written into the law in 2020 by Lei n.º 27-A/2020.

According to ECO and the Government's statement as reported by Jornal Económico, the law also:

• requires every contract above 950,000 euros to be reported to the court for checks during and after execution, a PS addition, even where no clearance is needed;
• lets bodies whose internal control systems are accredited, on an opinion from the finance inspectorate (IGF), skip prior clearance even above the threshold;
• makes managers financially liable only for intent or gross negligence (dolo ou culpa grave), and leaves it to the Public Prosecutor's Office to bring liability cases;
• extends the deadline after which a contract counts as tacitly cleared from 30 to 45 days, and lets the companies awarded contracts answer and appeal a refusal;
• splits the court's three sections so that one clears contracts, one audits and one judges liability.

State-owned companies competing in international markets with a private shareholder will face only legality audits, rather than leaving the court's oversight entirely as first proposed, according to ECO.

What it means for residents

The court is the main external check on how councils, ministries, hospitals and the autonomous regions spend public money. In 2025 it received 4,245 prior clearance cases worth more than 13.6 billion euros and refused 21, ECO reported from its activity report. Once the law is in force, a contract such as the 4.3 million euro Taser order cleared this month would go ahead without prior clearance, while one such as the 13.5 million euro Évora radiotherapy contract it refused would still need it. The Government says faster decisions will speed up public investment; the court has argued that less prior control needs strong alternative checks.

What happens next

The decree now goes to the President of the Republic. Under the Constitution, the President has eight days from receiving it to ask the Constitutional Court for a preventive review (article 278) and 20 days to sign it into law or veto it (article 136). If the President does not seek a review, Ms Calvão has said she may refuse to apply provisions she considers unconstitutional in individual cases, which would send them to the Constitutional Court; Lusa reported that she has called the Government's solution "truly unconstitutional".