Brussels, 17/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 17 February, the Council of Finance Ministers of the EU recommended that the European Parliament give the European Commission a discharge on the execution of the EU's 2013 budget.
The United Kingdom, Netherlands and Sweden voted against this recommendation. In a statement, they sharply regretted that for the twentieth consecutive year, the European Court of Auditors has been unable to grant an unqualified Statement of Assurance on the EU budget as a whole and that the overall error rate for expenditure remains significantly above the acceptable 2% threshold, standing virtually stable at 4.7%;.
These countries are hoping that the Commission of Jean-Claude Juncker “will take proactive steps to improve procedures in order to reduce the error rates compared to the last programming period”. These countries regret the Court's assessment that the error rate could have been considerably lower if Member States' authorities had made better use of the available information to prevent, detect and correct errors before declaring the expenditure to the Commission. These three countries said that “Member State authorities should take immediate action to correct errors promptly”.
During the Ecofin Council, Denmark (which supported the recommendation) emphasised that it was necessary to ensure that the EU budget did indeed create “added value” and expressed hope that the new multiannual financial framework would help improve EU fund implementation. Poland pointed out that the amount of structural funds increased in 2013 and that the rate of errors in the sector had not increased to the same proportion, which meant that progress had been made. The Polish Minister pointed out that error had nothing to do with fraud and calculated that fraud accounted for 0.2% of the total EU budget. Poland believes that the real problem is one of unpaid invoices.
In its recommendation, the Council said that it was also concerned by the fact that, according to estimates by the Court of Auditors, the most likely error rate for spending as a whole had risen to 4.7% in 2013. The Council also reveals that the control and supervisory systems audited by the Court of Auditors were only deemed partially effective for guaranteeing the legality and regularity of operations. The Council is calling on the Commission and member states to undertake further actions aimed at strengthening the quality of the management and control systems and making them more efficient, including the first level verifications. Finally, the Council is disappointed about the recurrent increase in the error rate for most policies directly managed by the Commission and urges the Commission to continue improving its control systems. (Lionel Changeur)