Congress and Senate reject the 2024 General State Account

The Plenary sessions of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate rejected the Declaration on the General State Account for the 2024 financial year and agreed to return it to the Court of Auditors. The decision was adopted in the sessions of September 10 and 29, 2026, respectively, and is published in the Official State Gazette number 279, of November 9, 2026, by means of the Resolution of October 15, 2026, of the Presidency of the Congress of Deputies and the Presidency of the Senate (reference BOE-A-2026-23477).

The published regulation reports on the Opinion of the Joint Commission for Relations with the Court of Auditors, processed in accordance with the rules of the Boards of the Congress and the Senate on the General State Account of March 1, 1984, with file numbers 250/000008 (Congress) and 770/000004 (Senate). The text bears the signatures of Francina Armengol Socias and Pedro Rollán Ojeda.

The starting point is the Declaration approved by the Plenary of the Court of Auditors, the auditing body that acts by delegation of the Courts according to Article 136 of the Spanish Constitution and Article 10 of Organic Law 2/1982, of May 12. The 2024 General Account was submitted by the Government on October 28, 2025, and registered with the Court the following day; the Declaration, numbered 1,677, was approved on April 29, 2026, under the presidency of Enriqueta Chicano Jávega.

Return due to the absence of Budgets

The first agreement rejects the Declaration, which consists of the consolidation of the annual accounts of the state public sector and the entities controlled by the General State Administration, multi-group entities, and associates. The second agreement approves the resolution of the Joint Commission, which returns the document to the Court for the following reasons:

• Absence of General State Budgets, affecting the mandate of Article 134.3 of the Constitution and converting the extension of Article 134.4 into an ordinary formula of government.
• Constant use of budgetary modifications, particularly 2.389.4 million euros for Passive Class pensions and minimum supplements, financed by reductions in Service 50 of the Recovery and Resilience Facility.
• Legal and budgetary risks of these practices, which weaken budgetary specificity and the traceability of European funds.
• Deterioration of public accounts, with negative net equity in progressive decline and debt interest of 32,362 million euros in 2024.

The resolution urges that the Account be presented in an expanded form, including a technical-legal report on the effects of the extension, within a non-extendable period of three months.

The figures supporting the rejection

The Court’s Declaration, echoed by the Opinion, notes that the 2024 execution relied on the 2023 budgets. Modifications increased the final credits by 77,341.9 million euros over the initial ones, of which 73,182.8 million were financed by appealing to the variation in the outstanding debt balance. Recognized obligations for interest rose from 29,066 million in 2023 to 32,362 million, an increase of 11.3%.

The negative consolidated net worth amounts to 776,000 million euros, with a decrease of 50,000 million during the fiscal year, and the budgetary result shows a negative balance of 18,093.4 million, which after the Court’s adjustments would reach 22,183.7 million. Expenditure commitments charged to future years reach 1,769,638 million euros, which limits the capacity to implement new policies.

In terms of national accounting, the official 2024 deficit was 2.8% of GDP (2.9% for the Central Administration), after excluding 5,590 million in extraordinary expenses due to the DANA of October 29, as recorded in the Declaration itself.

Qualifications and dissenting opinions

The Court’s opinion is favorable with qualifications. Among these are the lack of integration of 65 of the 447 entities of the state public sector, the overvaluation of the consolidated budgetary result by 4,090.3 million euros, obligations pending imputation for 5,365.8 million, and deficiencies in the inventories of tangible fixed assets, which amount to 319,327 million, nearly 50% of non-current assets.

The document also incorporates a dissenting vote from Javier Morillas Gómez, who reproaches the Declaration for not classifying the lack of a Budget project as a constitutional breach, and concurring votes from Isabel Fernández Torres and José Manuel Otero Lastres, Rebeca Laliga Misó, Miguel Ángel Torres Morato, and Elena Hernáez Salguero. The Court submits three proposals to the Chambers: remedy the qualifications, shorten the reporting deadlines, and resolve the Social Security debt to the State.

The rejection closes the 2024 budgetary cycle without parliamentary approval of the Account and provides official record that the control of public spending was exercised over accounts that were extended and corrected via credit modifications, a precedent that conditions the auditing of subsequent fiscal years.

Source: Official State Gazette, no. 279, November 9, 2026, Sec. III, p. 151010 (official reference: BOE-A-2026-23477).