Legal nature and control of earmarked funds received by local government units in crisis situations

Abstract

Crisis situations justify the use of extraordinary anti-crisis measures and instruments. The above rule could be observed in Poland during the pandemic crisis and the refugee crisis, when the Polish legislator specifically regulated the relationship between state authorities and local government units, both in the administrative and financial spheres. The mechanism introduced at that time to transfer the so-called “means” from special-purpose funds located in Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego caused a kind of revolution in the legal order regulating the budget economy of local governments. The main purpose of this article is to determine the legal nature of the income of local government units defined by the legislator as the so-called “means”, which are not grants or subsidies, received by these units in crisis periods. The analysis was conducted on the example of funds transferred to Polish local governments during the pandemic crisis in 2020 (from the COVID-19 Counteracting Fund) and during the refugee crisis in 2022 (from the Aid Fund). In this analysis, apart from the do gmatic method, the comparative legal method was used, consisting in comparing the legal features of the above-mentioned funds (“means”) with the legal features of the special-purpose subsidy (grant).