¿Tesorería Mayor o Tesorería General?: El control contable en los años 1720: una historia conflictiva

The paper studies the conflicts originated because of the organization of accounting control of the\nExchequer between two groups of persons who had to do with the first political-administrative reforms carried\nout by Philip V at the middle of the 1720s. The different forms of control practiced by the Tesorería Mayor\n(Main Treasury), which was established in 1703, and in particular the implications of the Unique account. In this\naccount were combined the accounts kept by the diverse treasurers of the army, who reported to the Main\nTreasurer. They also recorded the charge and discharge operations made by the responsible officers of the king's\nincomes when their product was trusted to the Main Treasurer. This was the case with the treasurers and receivers of the most important incomes of the Crown (general income, salt income, tobacco income, mining\nincome, etc.). The Main Treasurer supervised these agents and in this way one of the persons involved in the\nconflicts could compare the Main Treasury with a General Audit Body.\nThe Unique account was conceived in diverse ways by its contemporary, as the paper shows. While\nFernando Verdes Montenegro (Secretary of State and Finance of Louis I) and Jose Patiño (Secretary of Finance\nfrom October 1726) opted for systemizing the Unique account, the Treasurer Nicolás de Hinojosa promoted an\nalternative organization of control and the Treasury. In this proposal the Unique account disappears: the\nTreasurer, called here General, and the army treasurers present their accounts separately and the aggregation of\nthe information in order to establish balances and estimations was made out of the Treasury office. This\nunderstanding way of the General Treasury was abandoned few months after having been established: it\nfunctioned from March to September 1726.\nThe purpose of this paper is both informative and interpretive. It makes known this scarcely known episode in\nthe financial control history. My analysis confirms that this history is not a lineal process oriented towards\nconcentration, homogeneity, and rationality: it has to be read in political key. In fact, my hypothesis is that\nbehind the different Treasury models are at stake conflicting conceptions of financial government. For this\nreason, José Patiño does withdraw Hinojosa's General Treasury because of technical inferiority, but for political\nreasons.

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