Brussels, 11/12/2014 (Agence Europe) - In a very critical report published on Thursday 11 December, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) states that two of the European Commission's key tools for ensuring the transparency and accountability of EU aid expenditure - the evaluation and results-oriented monitoring (ROM) systems - are not reliable. The reason for this is that, in the ECA's opinion, these tools do not provide adequate information on EU development expenditure results (€8 billion per year).
The evaluations of projects and programmes which are organised by the Commission delegations in partner countries are badly managed, overall supervision is inadequate, the number of resources used is unclear and access to the results of these evaluations is lacking, says Karel Pinxten, the author of the report.
Pinxten states: “The demand for accountability for EU expenditure in all fields has never been higher. It is not good enough to report achievements in vague global terms. The Commission needs to have the building blocks necessary for a comprehensive reporting system which provides meaningful information for its own management and for its external stakeholders. One of these components is a strong evaluation system which feeds into an overall reporting process. At the present time, EuropeAid's system is inadequate.”
The report highlights the following issues: - most programme evaluations are carried out before the impacts and sustainability of measures can be ascertained, and ex-post evaluations are rarely carried out because there is generally no requirement for them; - there is a serious lack of third-party assessment of impacts and sustainability; - the follow-up of evaluations is not ensured.
The strategic evaluations (thematic and country evaluations) are better managed and more results-focused than programme evaluations, but the absence of well-defined objectives and indicators hampers the evaluation. Furthermore, the planned strategic evaluation programme for the 2007-2013 period was not executed in full, the ECA states. (AN)