Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors) Bounced 794 Visto Prévio Files Back as Unnecessary in 2024 — Four-Year Total Climbs to 2,694 as Reform Debate Eyes the €10 Million Threshold

The Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors) returned 794 visto prévio (prior-approval) files to public-sector contracting authorities in 2024 on the ground that the underlying contracts did not need the court's approval to proceed at all, Público reported on Saturday. The four-year cumulative total for 2021-2024 now stands at 2,694 unnecessary submissions.

The visto prévio is the legal gate the Tribunal de Contas applies to public expenditure above a statutory threshold under Lei 98/97 (the Lei de Organização e Processo do Tribunal de Contas). Contracts above the threshold are blocked from execution until the court signs off; contracts below it are out of scope and the contracting body should proceed directly. The 794 figure therefore reflects 794 files that government departments, municipalities and public entities sent to the court — taking on file-preparation cost and execution delay — for procurements where the law did not require it.

The drag on contracting timelines is the substantive complaint. Each visto prévio review locks the contract in pre-execution limbo for the duration of the court's queue, which has run between 60 and 120 days for routine files in recent years. The Tribunal de Contas itself burns resource on triage — staff time that would otherwise be deployed on the higher-value visto prévio backlog or on auditoria (audit) workflows.

The political backdrop sets up a reform window. The Ministério das Finanças (Finance Ministry) under Joaquim Miranda Sarmento has telegraphed support for raising the visto prévio threshold to €10 million from the current band that has triggered most of the surplus filings. The argument from Finance is twofold: that the EU's median public-procurement court-of-auditors threshold sits materially higher than Portugal's, and that the queue effect throws sand in the gears of the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (Recovery and Resilience Plan, PRR) absorption timeline.

The Tribunal de Contas under President Filipa Urbano Calvão has pushed back on threshold-raising as the primary fix, on the basis that it removes scrutiny from a tranche of contracts where corruption-detection value is high. The court's preferred reform path runs through procedural changes — shorter triage windows, electronic submission deepening and a presumption-of-conformity track for repeat contracting bodies that have cleared previous reviews without remarks.

The 794 unnecessary 2024 filings sit at the centre of that argument. They illustrate the threshold confusion — public entities self-routing borderline contracts to the court for legal certainty even when not required — but they also illustrate that a procedural fix (clearer guidance from the court on what is in scope) might handle the load without a statutory threshold change.

The reform debate runs in parallel with the broader institutional tension between the Tribunal de Contas and the Government over fiscalização sucessiva (post-execution scrutiny) of EU-funded contracts. That tension peaked over the 2024 PRR audit cycle and has not fully resolved.

The next checkpoint is the Orçamento do Estado 2026 (State Budget 2026) parliamentary debate, where the threshold language is expected to surface as a Finance Committee amendment.