If his name makes it through to the vote in the Catalan Parliament next week, Judge Josep Tomàs Salàs will soon leave judicial sentencing for the directorship of the Anti-Fraud Office. Until now, he has been the delegate for the criminal courts of Barcelona, ​​and among his former colleagues are four judges whom he himself mentored when they were preparing for their competitive examinations. In fact, those close to him say he would have dedicated more time to teaching were it not for the 75-hour annual limit that judges must adhere to. Salàs, 64, has said that if he leads the Anti-Fraud Office, he will be a "discreet" leader—he doesn't have social media accounts nor any interest in having them—and his profile represents a continuation of the approach taken by the current director of the Anti-Fraud Office, Miguel Ángel Gimeno, with whom he worked closely when he was Gimeno's chief of staff during his presidency of the High Court of Justice. Salàs prepared for his first competitive examinations while doing his military service. In 1984, he entered the justice system as a court officer. While working, he studied law and then practiced as a lawyer for twelve years. Those close to him recall that during this period he was "more financially successful than professionally fulfilled," as he handled, among other things, insurance and compensation claims. He eventually decided to prepare for new competitive examinations to return to the administration, this time as a legal advisor.

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: