IKEM repeatedly violated laws and its own rules in the management of its assets
PRESS RELEASE ON AUDIT NO 25/14 – 14 September 2026
Between the years 2022 and 2024, the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine (abbreviated as IKEM in Czech) repeatedly violated both laws and its own regulations when managing assets and public funds. This was revealed in an audit of the Supreme Audit Office (SAO), which examined 102 cases involving the management of funds totalling CZK 905.3 million. The auditors have identified shortcomings in nearly 47% of the audited sample, which included, inter alia, 30 public procurement contracts. In half of these contracts — with a total value exceeding CZK 380 million — the IKEM violated the Public Procurement Act or other legal regulations. In violation of the law, the IKEM awarded contracts to a single supplier without a competitive bidding process, repeatedly split the scope of the contract into individual orders, or accepted bid prices without verifying whether they corresponded to the market prices.
The most material findings concerned, for example, IT contracts for development of applications and cybersecurity. The IKEM repeatedly awarded these contracts to three suppliers without a competitive bidding process, paying them a total of CZK 59.5 million during the period under review.
Moreover, the IKEM has also procured services related to rental and maintenance of surgical linens without a competitive bidding process, solely through purchase orders. Even a year and a half after the contract ended, it continued to order these services from the existing supplier and paid a total of CZK 3.6 million for them. Subsequently, in the procurement process, the IKEM specified a requirement for the exact material composition of the linens to match the parameters of the previous supplier. According to the SAO, this unnecessarily restricted the pool of potential bidders and thus distorted competition. The audit found that the IKEM had been using surgical linens with a different material composition.
Upon purchasing an experimental magnetic resonance imaging machine, the IKEM accepted a sole bidding price and paid CZK 72 million (excluding VAT) for the device. It did not use publicly available sources to verify the price.
In addition, the audit identified that in 2005, the IKEM had entered a twenty-year housing contract for its employees without proper competitive tendering procedures. Under this contract, the IKEM had paid the contractor more than CZK 104 million between the years 2015 and 2025 for these services.
Furthermore, the SAO has also identified shortcomings in the disposal of assets. For 77% of the audited disposed assets, there was no documentation showing what assets had actually been disposed of and how they had been handled.
In total, the SAO identified 17 cases of possible breaches of budgetary discipline, amounting to over CZK 182 million, and referred these cases to the relevant tax authority.
According to the auditors, IKEM’s internal control system also repeatedly failed, as it was unable to detect violations of laws or of IKEM’s internal regulations. Without fundamental changes to this system, there is a risk that similar shortcomings will recur in the future.
The IKEM is a state contributory organisation under the Ministry of Health that provides highly specialised healthcare, particularly in the areas of cardiovascular diseases, organ transplants, and metabolic disorders. In 2024, it managed assets worth CZK 11.4 billion, and its operating expenses totalled CZK 6.2 billion.
Communication Department
Supreme Audit Office