Albania’s Supreme State Audit Institution (KLSH) has identified irregularities in the administration of Durrës Municipality, led by Emiriana Sako. The findings concern the use of public funds, procurement, the implementation of investments, tax collection, building permits and oversight of the territory.
The final audit report, prepared in October 2026, examines the municipality’s activities from January 1, 2023, to December 31, 2024. KLSH presented 44 findings and 45 recommendations and issued a qualified opinion on the institution because of material deviations from legal and regulatory requirements.
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Problems described in the report include companies that did not meet the criteria being declared winners of tenders, payments for work that was not carried out, tax arrears of 1.86 billion lek and a lack of oversight of the electronic tax system.
In procurement, the auditors examined 27 procedures with a combined maximum budget of 2.85 billion lek. In 11 of them, evaluation committees qualified and declared winners economic operators that did not meet all the conditions in the tender documents.
For seven other procedures, KLSH found that the qualification criteria did not fully comply with the law. According to the report, some requirements were unjustified or disproportionate to the subject of the contract and could undermine competition and the equal treatment of participants.
For these violations, KLSH recommended that the Public Procurement Agency take administrative and disciplinary action against members of the procurement units and bid evaluation committees.
Irregularities were also found during contract implementation. In 11 investment contracts with a total value of about 2.21 billion lek including VAT, discrepancies in the volumes of work caused economic damage of 30.35 million lek, excluding VAT, to the municipal budget.
The auditors are calling for administrative and legal steps to recover this amount. They also separately identified 14.23 million lek in funds used ineffectively because of an incorrect calculation of the maximum budget and the inclusion of VAT on machinery and equipment.
In the 2023 contract to reconstruct city roads, the contractor had begun work without a building permit, contrary to the law, the report found.
Some of the findings concern the electronic system for local taxes and fees. The private company managing Durrës Municipality’s IT system had full access to the database, which stored information on businesses, households and their tax liabilities.
The municipality had not approved internal rules for operating the system and did not have complete documentation on user administration. It was also unclear how access was handled for employees who left their jobs or changed positions.
The institution had not appointed an authorized person responsible for administering the database and taking possession of the source code. Meanwhile, people outside the municipality’s organizational structure were also carrying out work on the system.
According to KLSH, the database had not been registered with the responsible authority, as required by law, and the municipality had not conducted internal information technology audits.
There were also problems with data accuracy: information produced by the system did not match the official records used by the Tax Directorate to plan and report revenue.
The system contained entities with unpaid liabilities that were listed as active at the National Business Center (QKB) but recorded as closed, inactive or suspended in the municipal register. As a result, the system stopped generating tax liability notices for them, even though they remained active in the QKB.
The auditors found no regular reconciliation with the tax authorities to verify this data. The municipality also lacked sufficient checks on the accuracy of its records and documentation proving ongoing reconciliation with the tax authorities and the QKB.
The report also describes cases in which an entity requested a change of status at the QKB. If the municipality did not respond within the legal deadline, the status could change automatically; the municipal system would then stop billing the entity even if it had unpaid liabilities.
At the end of 2024, unpaid debts owed by private entities and households reached 1.86 billion lek, compared with 1.72 billion lek at the end of 2023. KLSH is calling for the liabilities to be reconciled, the system’s operation to be checked and legal avenues to be pursued to collect the debts.
Tax billing for households was interrupted. Because of technical problems, no subscribers were billed in June or July 2023; the charges for those months were added later, in March and April 2024.
For 2024, billing of local taxes and fees to household subscribers did not begin until October and continued through April 2025.
KLSH also found that the municipality had not compiled a register of household taxpayers. As a result, it could not fully identify households that were not subscribers of the water utility and were required to pay taxes directly to the municipality.
Shortcomings were also found in the municipality’s dealings with Durrës Water Supply and Sewerage, which acted as a tax collection agent. The parties reconciled the amounts transferred to the municipal budget, but not households’ precise liabilities, the payments they had made or the amounts left unpaid.
For the agricultural land tax, the municipality lacked a complete taxpayer register and up-to-date data on land areas and categories. Although revenue of 45 million lek had been planned for each of 2023 and 2024, only 9 million and 15.6 million lek, respectively, was collected.
The auditors found that this planning was not based on actual data. Of the 17,299 families allocated agricultural land, 1,251 paid the tax in 2023 and 1,574 in 2024.
In the administration of building permits, five cases involved calculations of the infrastructure impact tax that did not correspond to the area of the buildings or the fiscal package. According to KLSH, this cost the municipality 18.74 million lek in lost revenue.
In nine other cases, the conditions of the General Local Plan and development permits had not been fully applied. The discrepancies concerned the distance between buildings, building heights, development intensity and the land-use coefficient.
In five cases, the ownership documents uploaded to the electronic permit system were not up to date, and confirmation from the Cadastre was missing. In two cases, construction on the ground did not match the approved permits, while in three others there were shortcomings in the documents and checks required before certificates of use could be issued.
Violations were also found in the work of the Territorial Protection Inspectorate. In 200 cases, the chief inspector had not continued the procedure for issuing orders to demolish illegal buildings.
In 23 procedures where the auditors identified elements of the criminal offense of illegal construction, the inspectorate had not referred the indications to the competent authorities. KLSH also noted that different procedures had been applied to similar cases, pointing to the use of double standards.
Fine collection also presented problems. Of 277 administrative decisions totaling 79.49 million lek, only 9.6 million lek had been paid voluntarily, while 69.89 million lek remained uncollected. In 252 cases, there was no confirmation that the offenders had been notified.
In 65 cases, the inspectorate imposed fines of 500,000 lek for work without a permit, although, according to KLSH, the amount should have been calculated under the relevant provisions of the law on territorial planning and development. In 53 procedures from 2023–2024, the violations had not been documented with photographs or video.
The audit also found cases in which work had not been suspended, even though documentation needed to be completed or technical safety at the site improved.
The findings span Durrës Municipality’s administrative processes from beginning to end: drafting tender criteria, selecting winners, inspecting work, managing taxes and electronic systems, and enforcing the law against illegal construction.
Alongside recovering the economic damage and collecting outstanding liabilities, KLSH is calling for an examination of cases in which companies that did not meet tender criteria were qualified, for administrative responsibilities to be established and for action to be taken against officials involved in the identified violations.
