Brussels, 01/02/2012 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 1 February, the EU Court of Auditors concluded that “despite there still being scope for further improvement, the Commission has clearly learned important lessons from previous enlargements which has made its assistance to Croatia more effective.”
One of the main aims of EU pre-accession assistance to Croatia (€150 million every year from 2007) is to help the country strengthen its administrative capacity in preparation for managing the larger amounts of EU funding available to it once it becomes a member state, such as structural and cohesion funds. The audit also assessed the efficiency of EU aid in terms of appropriateness and the results achieved.
The Court stated that overall, EU pre-accession aid to Croatia significantly contributed to strengthening administrative capacity in the country for managing EU funding, which will increase after accession. Nonetheless, the Court considers that so far the aid objectives have only been partially attained and further progress in strengthening capacity has to be made in certain key areas both before and after accession. In most of the domains involving pre-accession aid, the Commission considers that Croatia's capacities were still not sufficient enough to authorise aid implementation without ex ante controls. Despite recent progress accomplished, capacity in the area of procurement and fighting corruption are two areas in particular that require further support for the Croatian authorities.
According to the Court, aid was appropriately planned (taking into account the lessons learned from previous enlargement) and in terms of results, EU aid has helped significantly to strengthen Croatia's capacity to manage subsequent accession funding, particularly by learning through doing. Nevertheless, the results hoped for in certain projects have not yet been obtained and the audit helped to highlight a certain number of key problem areas. Aid implementation to projects in Croatia was very often not carried out according to the initially planned deadlines, mainly due to delays resulting from insufficient development phases and insufficient capacity for procurement. Project follow-up and assessment for structural funds can still be improved. Although emphasis was placed on development of major infrastructure projects at a central level, projects that involved amounts of less than €50 million received little attention and implementation of a system that was capable of developing project proposals at regional and local levels was not entirely carried out. In the rural development sector, implementation experienced low absorption rates (expenses declared at the end of the programme only accounted for 48% of the allocated funds). Although EU projects have helped make progress in the fight against corruption and organised crime, significant challenges still need to be met in this domain, the Court explained. (LC/transl.fl)