Directorate-General for Auditing European Support

Rationale

EUTAF's payroll is the dominant cost — 64.8% of the 5,147.0 millió Ft envelope. The function the payroll buys is a genuine control function: it verifies that money already committed under EU operational programmes was spent on what it was committed for. As long as Hungary draws EU structural and cohesion funds, the Audit Authority is not optional. It is a hard condition of access written into EU regulation; without a functionally independent audit body issuing audit opinions, the disbursement channel does not open. This is the second case of the first-principles rubric: the classical-liberal frame would not, on its own terms, originate a standing fund-policing bureaucracy — but while Hungary participates in the EU-funds architecture, the audit function is the rule-of-law counterpart to it, the part that checks the discretionary allocation rather than performing it. Verifying that committed money was spent lawfully is closer to a contract-enforcement function than to a subjective political allocation. On that basis the payroll is a Keep — but a Keep whose tenure is tied to the underlying activity, not to the agency.

Rationale

Non-payroll running costs — office space, IT systems, audit-software licences, travel to audited project sites, external expert services. At 26.1% of the envelope this is a normal operating-cost share for an audit body that must send staff to inspect projects across the country. The line is a Keep on the same conditional basis as the payroll: it funds the operating substrate of a function that is required while the underlying activity continues. It is, however, the line where an operating-efficiency review would land if the agency's remit were ever consolidated — Keep precludes phase-out, not scrutiny of whether 1,344.7 millió Ft of materials cost is well spent.

Rationale

The employer-side payroll levy on EUTAF's own staff. It moves mechanically with the personnel line and the same reasoning applies. Worth noting only as an instance of a general pattern: 466.7 millió Ft is the state taxing its own audit agency's wage bill and recycling the receipt through the central budget. The ratio — 466.7 against 3,335.6 in gross personnel cost, about 14% — reflects the 13% szociális hozzájárulási adó plus minor employer obligations. For every 100 Ft EUTAF pays in gross wages, roughly 14 Ft is employer-side levy before the auditor receives anything, and the auditor's own SZJA at 15% and TB-járulék at 18.5% then apply to the gross wage; on the standard total-employer-cost baseline, roughly 41 Ft of every 100 Ft of full compensation cost reaches the state before the auditor spends a forint of take-home. This is the general payroll wedge, visible here on a public agency's own books; it is not specific to EUTAF and carries no separate classification.