Israel’s State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman published a sweeping set of economic audit reports on Wednesday, portraying severe failures in the management of public money, state resources and regulation. The findings include illegal budget transfers at the end of 2024, major weaknesses in the mortgage market, gaps in state pensions oversight, consumer-protection erosion, and security flaws in Tax Authority systems that enable identity theft and large-scale tax fraud.
On budget transfers, Englman said 2024 saw an unprecedented volume of supplementary budget approvals, warning that the practice raises concern about bypassing the Budget Foundations Law, damaging decision-making, weakening Knesset oversight, and undermining proper management of public funds and government policy implementation. He also said the mortgage-ייעוץ sector is unregulated, leaving consumers exposed to aggressive marketing, excessive fees and advice that is not necessarily objective. The mortgage market itself was described as involving structural gaps in a market worth 630 billion shekels.
In taxation, the audit found vulnerabilities in the Tax Authority’s “Israel Invoices” system, which are being exploited to steal the identities of legitimate business owners. Englman said the authority responded only after the fact, following complaints about impostors connecting to its systems after invoice allocation numbers had already been approved. In energy, the ministry has still not made strategic decisions for a scenario in which gas reserves run out in about 25 years, while transport pollution was estimated to cost 10.9 billion shekels in 2024.
The report also found that state housing management has not been mapped digitally for 25 years, causing lost income of up to 288 million shekels from a four-year delay in installing photovoltaic systems on government buildings, and more than 100 million shekels in property is sitting empty. In the civil-service pensions system, auditors found payments to ineligible survivors, no proper oversight of orphan beneficiaries, and reliance on spreadsheets instead of a modern payroll system. Consumer protection oversight has also weakened, with complaint handling taking 135 days, and delays at the Orot Rabin power project caused about 4.6 billion shekels in economic damage. Englman said previous correction efforts failed, and in some areas the problems worsened.
