At least 54,268 euros were allegedly embezzled from the budget of the Rezekne Technical School from 2019 to 2025, as determined during the audit by the State Audit Office, reports Diena.
As a result of the audit, a criminal case has been initiated for large-scale fraud or fraud committed by an organized group. During the service investigation, the director of the educational institution, Benita Virbule, has been suspended from her position, and suspicions of illegal actions have fallen on two individuals.
In April of this year, the State Audit Office conducted a selective audit of 60 institutions, including the Rezekne Technical School, to determine whether the consolidated annual report met the established requirements. The audit is still ongoing, but an interim report has already been prepared for the technical school.
A representative of the State Audit Office, Ilze Badere, reported at a meeting of the parliamentary commission on public expenditures and audits that the annual expenses of the technical school amount to 4.8 million euros, with about a thousand payments made monthly.
The audit revealed suspicious transactions in payments to service providers - intentional distortion of payment documents with funds being transferred "not to those for whom they were intended." In total, there were 183 such transfers - two to three per month. Mostly, these were small amounts, making them harder to notice among other payments and more difficult to detect during the audit.
The smallest amount was 84 euros, the largest was 451 euros, and the average was 297 euros. Funds were transferred not only to the accounts specified in contracts with specific suppliers but also to three others, whose ownership is unknown. Cases were also identified where the same account was paid twice - once according to the official details and a second time to another account. For example, the technical school initially transferred 355 euros to the account specified in the contract, and ten days later, the same amount to another account.
In total, more than 54,000 euros were transferred to these three accounts from 2019 to 2025.
After the State Audit Office demanded explanations, corrections appeared in the technical school's accounting system - the account numbers of the suppliers were changed. Discrepancies were also found between the documents submitted by the technical school and the data from the State Treasury regarding payment operations. According to the State Audit Office, this indicates attempts to conceal the true state of affairs.
