Müteşebbis İdare ve Belediye Şirketleri: Sayıştay Raporları Işığında Eleştirel Bir Verimlilik Değerlendirmesi

In recent years, companies established by or with the participation of municipalities have become increasingly important instruments in the provision of local public services. This development requires public administration to be assessed not only through the lens of its classical public-law organisation but also from the perspective of an “entrepreneurial administration” operating in the economic sphere. Municipal companies are commonly justified on the grounds of speed, flexibility, and efficiency and are assumed to facilitate the more effective delivery of public services outside traditional administrative structures. Yet the extent to which this assumption is supported by concrete audit findings warrants closer scrutiny.

This study examines whether municipal companies can invariably be regarded as instruments for ensuring efficiency and effectiveness, drawing not on abstract normative assumptions but on concrete audit findings. To this end, its empirical basis consists of the audit reports issued by the Turkish Court of Accounts on companies affiliated with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality for the period 2022–2024. The analysis proceeds from the premise that, although these reports do not provide a direct measure of efficiency, they contain recurring and concrete findings that make it possible to test the claims of efficiency advanced in support of municipal corporatisation.

The findings derived from the reports are comparatively classified under four main headings: the budgetary effects of corporatisation; problems of accountability and financial transparency; closed intra-affiliate relations and the resulting competition risks; and problems relating to procurement rules and legal basis. Within this framework, the reports indicate that profitability does not necessarily coincide with financial sustainability in many of the companies examined. Unrecorded severance liabilities, delay charges, uncollected receivables, and forgone revenues point to indirect burdens on the municipal budget. In addition, recurring shortcomings relating to provisions for litigation, depreciation, inventory, accounting reliability, and internal control reveal structural weaknesses in financial transparency and institutional oversight.

The reports also show that the direct procurement of services and personnel among municipal affiliates creates the appearance of a closed intra-municipal economic network. Although these findings do not automatically establish market distortion in the strict sense, they reveal significant competition risks and privileged relations among affiliates. Finally, the repeated use of procurement exceptions and direct procurement methods, transactions conducted without written contracts, certain financial operations carried out without municipal council scrutiny, and irregularities concerning licences and the use of immovable property suggest that corporatisation may create grey areas in the application of public-law safeguards.

The study concludes that municipal companies cannot be regarded as neutral instruments that automatically ensure efficiency and effectiveness in all circumstances. On the contrary, the comparative dataset suggests that, in a considerable number of cases, corporatisation may generate hidden financial burdens, weaken accountability, foster closed affiliate relations, and erode procurement and public-law discipline. It is therefore argued that corporatisation should be treated as an exceptional instrument whose use must be specifically justified in relation to each field of public service.