Integrity Authority

Rationale

This is the capital line — the felhalmozási (accumulation) budget for investments. At 5,374.2 millió Ft it is the single largest line in the chapter, larger than the personnel line and 38% of the entire chapter envelope. A capital allocation of this scale for a four-year-old analytical authority of roughly 109 staff is conspicuous: it is not a routine maintenance-grade replacement line of the kind a settled institution carries, but a discretionary build-out — new systems, fit-out, equipment, or accumulation of assets. Capital investment is forward-looking by definition: it commits real resources now in order to expand or upgrade an institution's capacity for future years. Committing 5,374.2 millió Ft of new capital to an authority that the framework classifies for a five-year wind-down is to spend a large sum building capacity that will be stranded before it is depreciated. The line should not be classified as a phased reduction, because there is no protected party in a capital line that has not yet been spent: no employee's livelihood, no counterparty's contractual right, no recipient's accrued entitlement attaches to a prospective 2026 investment appropriation. Where any portion is already contractually committed — a signed equipment or construction contract — that specific commitment is honoured through contract run-off, exactly as the operating-line counterparties are; but the unspent, uncommitted balance of a forward-looking capital line for an institution slated for closure is the textbook immediate cut. The resources are returned to the taxpayers who would otherwise have funded an asset build-out for a body in run-off.

Rationale

This line funds the salaries of the Authority's staff — a body of approximately 100–120 employees (headcount per the Authority's published integrity reports),[^3] comprising analysts, integrity-risk assessors, lawyers, and administrative staff. The classification question is not whether these are capable people doing diligent work; the Authority's annual analytical reports suggest they are. The question is what the line is *for*, and the answer is supplied by the Authority's own founding logic. The Integrity Authority exists to monitor the integrity of state spending of EU funds. Set that against the framework. There is no rights-protection function here: the Authority does not enforce contracts, secure property, or adjudicate disputes between citizens — prosecution of corruption remains, as the Authority's own leadership has noted, outside its mandate and with the ordinary prosecution service.[^3] There is no constitutional precondition: nothing in the rule-of-law order requires that a dedicated standing authority audit one particular funding stream. And there is no protective response to irreversible involuntary harm. What there is, instead, is an oversight body whose entire workload is generated by a prior arrangement — the discretionary state allocation of a very large pool of grant money through public tenders. Follow the chain. EU structural and cohesion funds arrive as a pool of money allocated by political and administrative officeholders to recipients chosen through state procurement and grant procedures. Wherever a large pool of money is allocated by discretion rather than by the priced choices of the people whose money it is, the allocation generates rent: the recipient who secures the grant captures a benefit that was not competed away in an open market, and the contest to secure it consumes real resources — relationships, proximity to the decision, the apparatus of qualifying and disqualifying bids. The Integrity Authority is the institutional response to the visible symptoms of that rent. It is not the cure for the rent, because the rent is produced by the discretionary-allocation mechanism itself, not by any deficiency of monitoring. A cleaner tender, more scrupulously policed, redirects the same rent to a better-credentialed recipient; it does not eliminate the rent. The supervisor's existence is evidence that the state allocates too much by discretion, and the honest classification follows the underlying activity, not the symptom. The seen is a 109-person anti-corruption authority — a sympathetic, reform-coded institution that few will defend cutting. The unseen is the structure that makes it necessary and the structure of who pays for it. A working household in Hungary funds this 14,238.2 millió Ft chapter through the same payroll wedge and consumption taxes that fund every chapter: out of every 100 Ft of total employer cost, roughly 37 Ft reaches the state before the worker spends anything — 13 Ft of employer social-contribution tax, 15 Ft of personal income tax, 18.5 Ft of employee social-insurance contribution on the gross wage[^4] — and ÁFA at 27% on what is then spent removes a further 13-14 Ft of the original 100.[^5] Excise on fuel and energy lifts the cumulative state take on a typical working household toward 55-60%. Some slice of that take funds an authority whose job is to watch other officeholders spend a pool of grant money the same household also funded. The household is taxed twice over by the arrangement: once to fill the discretionary grant pool, and again to police it. The reform proposed here does not remove the watching while leaving the spending; it shrinks the discretionary spending so the watching is no longer needed. The honest destination is therefore to wind the Authority down in parallel with the reduction of the discretionary EU-funds-allocation apparatus it monitors — not to abolish it abruptly. Two reliance facts push this to a phase-out rather than an immediate cut. First, the Authority employs roughly 109 people on permanent contracts who organised their working lives around the institution. Second, the Authority discharges, for the current EU programming period, a monitoring function that is contractually entangled with Hungary's access to in-flight EU funds: removing it mid-period, before the associated funding streams and conditionality commitments have run their course, would itself be a breach with fiscal consequences. The realistic horizon is the remaining length of the 2021-2027 EU programming period and its closure and audit tail — a five-year transition from the 2026 budget, by which point the programming-period obligations have run off and the discretionary-allocation reform that removes the underlying workload can be substantially complete. The protected party for the personnel line is the staff. The appropriate bridge is severance-with-overlap: affected employees retain their full state salary for a 24-month transition window and may take private-sector employment during it, keeping both incomes. Integrity analysts, compliance lawyers, and risk assessors hold exactly the transferable skills that private-sector audit, compliance, and legal functions hire — the re-employment path is real, not notional. The overlap turns the staff from defenders of the institution into participants in its wind-down.

Rationale

The operating costs of the Authority — premises, utilities, IT systems and data subscriptions, professional services, external analytical and audit support, communications. At 3,667.2 millió Ft this is a substantial operating line, roughly 81% of the size of the personnel line, which is consistent with a body whose output is data-intensive analytical work supported by external systems and contracted expertise. These are not payroll costs and they are not protected by the severance mechanism: contract counterparties on the Authority's service and supply contracts are protected by contract run-off — their agreements are honoured to their terms — not by employee transition. As those contracts reach their natural expiry across the transition window they are not renewed, and the non-payroll operating cost falls toward zero as the Authority's workload winds down with the programming period.

Rationale

This is the employer-side payroll charge — social contribution tax and related employer levies — on the personnel line above. It is a mechanical companion to the salary line and follows its classification and its schedule. Where the salaries are carried as severance-with-overlap, the employer charges on those salaries are carried with them: an employee on the bridge is still an employee, and the employer levies are still due. The line is part of the payroll component for the purpose of the severance computation.