The obligation to finance physical culture and sport rests with the communes. Enormous amounts are intended for this purpose every year. In two and a half years, the six audited communes - Gdańsk, Poznań, Bydgoszcz, Szczecin, Lublin, the centre of Warsaw [Śródmieście district] - spent more than PLN 1.6 billion (Poznań spent the biggest amount - PLN 870 million). This money goes first of all to the maintenance of sports facilities and the activity of physical culture institutions. The communes spend it also on subsidising tasks performed by sports clubs (e.g. organisation of competitions and camps), payment of scholarships and prizes as well as financing of extracurricular sports classes.
Subsidising sports clubs is the basic form of the communes’ support of sport in their area. The audited local governments allocated more than PLN 91 million to that purpose. The communes had a green light to finance recreational sport but the extreme (competitive) sport was subject to completely different rules of financing. The local governments could foster it by subsidising studies and prizes for competitors and coaches for very good sports results. The NIK audit showed, however, that 4 of 6 communes infringed effective regulations and paid PLN 22.5 million to the sports clubs as grants.
As much as 95 percent of grants for the clubs were awarded in open tenders, the remaining were given based on the clubs’ requests. The NIK auditors point to some cases where the offers and requests lacked the data required by the law. It also happened that some data was inconsistent with the actual status. For instance, the club SPR Lublin SSA (Lublin Handball Section) concealed that it was subject to enforcement proceedings (this fact would have taken the PLN 1 million grant away from them). The inspectors also found some irregularity in the evaluation of offers as such. In Poznań, competition boards reviewed the offers according to some incoherent principles. At the same time, in Lublin the offers with some gaps were evaluated positively. In both cases the supervision of the competition boards’ activity on part of the city council was ineffective.
Above 70 percent of sports clubs did not observe the terms of agreements signed with the communes. The list of objections listed by NIK is serious: the grants were used against contractual terms, the money was spent inappropriately. Additionally, the clubs improperly settled those funds. Frequently, the clubs organised some competitions or camps for a smaller number of participants than declared beforehand. Sometimes they even shortened their duration. The abovementioned club from Lublin spent a half of the grant amount (more than PLN 1 million) against contractual terms, e.g. on financing the writs of enforcement, the rent of premises and apartments for competitors and legal service.
The clubs’ offers included incorrectly estimated planned costs and revenue from the organisation of sports events. According to NIK, the underestimated earnings were of vital importance for the level of subsidies granted. An extreme case was OŚ AZS Poznań (Poznań Branch of the Academic Sports Association) which made a profit exceeding the grant level threefold, which means it could organise competition without reaching for the public funds. Pursuant to the audit findings, more than a half of the audited sports clubs breached the law as they did not separately recognise the money received from the local governments in the accounting records.
The NIK inspectors revealed that a half of the communes (Bydgoszcz, Lublin, Szczecin) were shareholders of sports clubs. The cities’ authorities deposited the total of PLN 16 million there. The problem was that the companies generated significant losses - in the years 2009-2010 they totalled PLN 12 million. The President of Bydgoszcz who paid the companies most (as much as PLN 14.6 million) explained that financial losses on the operations had been assumed from the very beginning, so as to maintain financial liquidity. The companies’ standing is to improve after strategic investors have been found.
The audited communes spent nearly PLN 11 million on sports scholarships. Their levels varied depending on the city. The biggest average grant was awarded by Gdańsk - PLN 15 thousand, in Szczecin it was PLN 6.5 thousand, and in Poznań PLN 2.8 thousand. NIK positively evaluated the financing of extracurricular sports classes by local governments as part of anti-alcohol prophylaxis. The communes spent nearly PLN 7 million on that form of aid.
