For almost 15 years, we have been promoting improvements in the institutional quality of our public administrations with the aim of achieving greater engagement with citizens and, therefore, greater social legitimacy. This involves a set of organizational reforms such as transparency, accountability, open government, integrity and the fight against corruption, and internal systems of complianceetc. All of this was deployed judiciously, since these elements of institutional quality represented the perennial challenge for national administrations compared to those of the most advanced and mature democratic countries. Moving from rhetoric to practice has not been easy, and administrations have had to invest an extraordinary amount of resources to implement these strategies. The result of all this has generated two paradoxes. The first: surprisingly, ordinary citizens have greeted all these changes with complete indifference. The second: the organizational efforts to meet these new demands have been detrimental to the quality of public services, and currently, the social legitimacy of public administrations is surely at its lowest point in the last four decades. In short: we have promoted instruments to enjoy greater social support, and the result has been just the opposite. We offer some reflections on what has happened in recent years:

Daniel de Alfonso, former director of the Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia (OAC), will have to return €82,341 for improper payments he received while heading the agency. This was determined by the Court of Auditors, which partially upheld the request made by both the OAC's lawyer and the Public Prosecutor's Office following a report from the Catalan Audit Office that alerted authorities to these irregularities. The oversight body found De Alfonso liable for misappropriating bonuses to which he was not entitled, through supplements added to his salary. The former director, who is a judge, had improperly awarded himself seniority bonuses based on his service in various judicial positions prior to his arrival at the Anti-Fraud Office. Under the regulations in force at the time, he could not do so: according to the statutes governing the internal workings and administration of Parliament, applicable to this office, employees could only have their seniority increments for service within that office itself counted, and not in any other public administration. De Alfonso is a judge and, therefore, the Court of Auditors considers it "unquestionable" that, with his legal training, he should have seen that he was not applying the regulations correctly.

Daniel de Alfonso, former director of the Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia (OAC), He was dismissed in 2016 for allegedly being linked to the dirty war against the independence movement. His name came into question following the publication of conversations held just before the November 9th referendum, in which he conspired with former PP Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz to fabricate information incriminating leaders of Convergència e Esquerra (Convergència e Esquerra). Once he left the organization, it came to light that De Alfonso and two other former senior OAC officials received additional salaries through "undue" three-year periods—amounting to €200,000—and through other items added to their paychecks, such as a quality bonus. This was stated this Monday by the Anti-Fraud lawyer and the Prosecutor's Office in a trial before the Court of Auditors, which will now have to decide whether De Alfonso's accounting liability has been proven and order him to repay the money.