Brussels, 29/10/2010 (Agence Europe) - The European Court of Auditors has criticised the clearance of accounts procedure put in place by the European Commission to recover illegal or fraudulent agricultural expenditure paid to member states. In a report published on Friday 29 October, the Court notes that, between 1999 and the end of 2008, the Commission recovered €5,582 million from member states through its conformity clearance procedure. “However, significant shortcomings still affect the implementation of the conformity clearance procedure and adversely impact on the achievement of its objective to exclude irregular payments.”
The European Commission, it is reported, “does not share the Court's criticisms”. The Commission states that the procedure has demonstrated its effectiveness over the course of the last few years, as shown by “the constant reduction of the average error rate in agriculture expenditure. The error rate is now around 2%”.
The Court noted that the bulk of financial corrections (by value) are flat-rate corrections. “The difficulty with this type of correction is that they do not provide an adequate basis to determine accurately the total amount of irregular payments that are due to weaknesses found in the systems. Thus, the conformity decisions … do not therefore directly exclude this irregular expenditure from Community financing”. In general terms, the Court observed that the conformity clearance procedure is too long. At the end of 2008, the clearance of accounts was not complete for any year later than 2001. Every year, member states' disbursement agencies pay out some €54 billion in agricultural spending. Final validation of this expenditure by the Commission is through this clearance of accounts procedure. (L.C./transl.rt)