La relación entre la Ley 42 de 1923 y el Acto Legislativo 4 de 2019: continuidad y ruptura en el control fiscal colombiano

Abstract

Abstract

The literature on public financial oversight in Colombia treats the preventive and concurrent control introduced by Amendment 4 of 2019 as a novelty relative to the posterior and selective design of 1991. This article questions that assumption through a documentary examination of the normative sources that preceded the 1991 Constitution, from the Constitutions of 1858, 1863, and 1886 to Law 42 of 1923 and Legislative Act 1 of 1945. The analysis traces, in each legal provision, the entity holding of the power to close public accounts and whether that power is exclusive or concurrent. The results show that the concentration of this power in a single technical officer -the Comptroller General- did not originate in 2019 or in 1991, but in 1923, when Law 42 first qualified it as exclusive, displacing a collegiate body of parliamentary origin. The article concludes that the relationship between Law 42 of 1923 and Amendment 4 of 2019 is one of continuity in the subject and variation in the timing of control, and that technical concentration and temporal anticipation are independent variables of the institutional design of public financial oversight.