State Audit Office Flags Systemic Weaknesses at Market Inspectorate: 165 Inspectors Missing, Digitalization Lagging

North Macedonia’s State Audit Office (SAO) has found serious systemic weaknesses in the work of the State Market Inspectorate (SMI), after auditing its 2024 financial statements and compliance. On compliance matters, the auditors expressed an adverse (unfavorable) opinion.

According to the report, the Inspectorate works with roughly half the number of inspectors it should have: it is short of as many as 165 inspectors, meaning that filled positions stand at about half of the number foreseen by its organizational act. The situation is even more critical in the non-food product safety sector, where as of December 31, 2024, only 5 of the 14 planned positions had been filled.

The SAO also notes that the registries and information system for managing inspection oversight have yet to be created, while the “E-inspector” application is not in full use. Nor does there exist a single, complete electronic database with an integrated risk-assessment methodology, which hampers risk-based planning of inspections. Moreover, documents created and submitted during inspections are registered incompletely, while monitoring of legislative changes and updating of checklists is not carried out as required.

The report also records several positive findings. Laboratory expenses for product analyses were covered by the GIZ EU4Business project (2022–2025) and Regio Trade (2025–2028), while with CEFTA support an IT link was created for the electronic exchange of data on unsafe products. Based on laboratory analyses from 2022 to 2025, 40 products were withdrawn from the market.

The audit stresses that filling the inspector ranks, making the electronic system fully functional, and improving risk-based planning are the key conditions for guaranteeing effective consumer protection and market safety.

Burimi: 24-ore.com