The delinquency data of some municipalities are dizzying. According to the statistics of the Ministry of Finance on Average Terms of Payment to suppliers (PMP), there are nine municipalities with periods greater than 1,000 days and it so happens that all of them are smaller in size. They are those of Torrecera (Cádiz), Castilleja de Guzmán (Seville), La Bisbal d’Emporda (Girona)Titulcia, Moraleja de Enmedio and Estremera (Madrid), Nerva (Huelva), Cortes de la Frontera (Málaga) and Salillas del Jalón (Zaragoza).
Of all of them, La Bisbal d’Empordá, in Girona, is the one with the largest volume of outstanding debt: a total of 4,314,459.52 euros at an average term of 1,237.23 days (3.4 years). However, its mayor, Enric Marquès, argues that the exaggerated payment term that appears in the Treasury statistics due to accounting error which has already been corrected in the autumn, which will allow La Bisbal to stop appearing in the ‘top ten’ of delinquencies in the next official statistics. Not so, at the moment.
Among the provincial capitals and cities, the high average payment terms of Jaen (629 days); talkin the province of Madrid (422 days), Jerez de la Fronterain Cadiz (360.27 days); Santa Maria Port, in Cádiz (247.27 days) or Badalona, in the province of Barcelona (222.58 days). All these municipalities will have to take advantage of the new Supplier Payment Plan by which the Ministry of Finance will provide them with financing to settle their oldest invoices, prior to July 1, 2021, in exchange for presenting an adjustment plan. Although with shorter terms, the provincial capitals of Granada, Ourense, Cordoba, Seville and Cáceres. None of the four Catalan capitals are bound by the plan.
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The Treasury has incorporated into the Payment Plan the 1,640 municipalities (235 are Catalan and can be found in this search engine) whose average invoice payment term exceeded the legal limit of 30 days in the statistics of December 2020, or March or June of 2021. However, a good part of these municipalities have been speeding up their invoices in recent months and voluntarily updating themselves, after the Treasury decided to incorporate the new Payment Plan in the draft State Budget for 2022. Thus, in Last September, just under 1,040 municipalities (of the total of 1,640 in the initial list) presented an average payment term of more than 30 days. The rest had adjusted their average term below 30 days.
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In the case of Catalonia, only 75 municipalities presented in September an average payment term above the legal limit of 30 days (compared to the 235 on the Treasury list). This indicates that one in three of the Catalan municipalities with the most delinquent history has been catching up in recent months. This is the case, for example, of the small Barcelona municipality of Sant Boi de Llucanèswhose average payment term has gone from 64 days in the March 2021 statistics to 22 days in the September one.
In the opposite direction, for example, the City of Madrid, which does not appear on the Treasury list, has increased its average payment term to 35 days in the September statistics, with an amount of 125.6 million debt pending settlement to its suppliers. It is also the case of Barcelona Metropolitan Area which, with data from September, accumulates outstanding debt for just over 23 million, with an average payment term of 33.17 days.