Brussels, 08/12/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 7 December, MEPs from the budgetary control committee called for an improvement in controls for cohesion policy funding.
As part of the discharge procedure on the EU's 2014 budget, the European Parliament's budgetary control committee heard European Commissioner for Regional Policy Corina Cretu on Monday 7 December.
A representative from the European Court of Auditors (ECA), Ladislav Balko, stated that the estimated level of error for the “Economic, social and territorial cohesion” heading stood at 5.7% in 2014 (compared with 5.9% in 2013): regional and urban policy at 6.1% (compared with 7.0% in 2013) and employment and social affairs at 3.7% (compared with 3.1% in 2013). “This remains a significant level beyond the 2% materiality threshold”, Balko stated.
Cretu defended the cohesion policy's balance sheet. She spoke of “positive results”. The 6.1% rate of error in 2014 is a little below the rate in the 2007-2013 period, she said. The Commission is carrying out audits and reviewing the countries' control systems. Cretu said that in 2014 over 8,500 programmes had been checked and the Commission had interrupted 131 programmes for €7.8 billion. The programmes will not be resumed before the irregularities have been corrected. There will be further financial controls in 2017, Cretu added.
Financial engineering instruments. Ingeborg Grässle (EPP, German), who chairs the budgetary control committee, spoke about the ECA's criticism of prolonging the eligibility period for the financial engineering instruments. Since 2007, the member states have in total set up 941 financial engineering instruments for an amount of around €14.3 billion. In April 2015, the Commission chose to prolong the eligibility period of these instruments by its own decision “rather than by asking the Council and Parliament to amend the time period set by the relevant Council regulation. We do not think that this way of prolonging the eligibility period respects the hierarchy of norms”, the ECA report states. In response, Cretu told MEPs that the Commission had prolonged this time period “following the Council's request. Perhaps this is about a war between experts”.
“The rate of error could have been lower if the states had used all the information available to them”, the rapporteur on the 2014 discharge, Martina Dlabajova (ALDE, Czech Republic), stated. Indeed the ECA pointed out that “for a significant number of operations marred by errors”, the member states' authorities had sufficient information to be able to prevent, detect or correct the errors before asking the Commission for reimbursement. In Dlabajova's view, the ECA and Parliament have repeatedly asked for this problem to be resolved. “Was the Commission aware of the cases detected by the ECA or not? If not, it means that even the Commission's controls do not work”, she said. Dlabajova asked if the Commission should not have made more of ex ante controls to ensure a lower error rate on public procurement and state aid.
“We are disappointed by this 40% of errors which should reportedly have been detected if the ex ante controls had been done correctly”, said Cretu, calling for the national authorities to do their jobs. She argued for simple rules and spoke of the corrective and preventive measures taken by the Commission. “It's up to the member states to improve their audit systems in order to avoid this type of error”, Cretu concluded, recommending the countries to use the ARACHNE system that aims to detect fraud. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)
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