Brussels, 14/03/2016 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission has not acted quickly enough or boldly enough to ensure compliance with the services directive (2006/123/EC), according to the European Court of Auditors, the role of which is to ensure that public money is well spent, in its report on the said directive published on Monday 14 March.
The verdict is unequivocal. Some 20 member states failed to transpose the directive within the deadline set - December 2009, three years after it was adopted. “The European Commission is not looking after the interests of Europe's consumers or service providers as well as it should”, said Neven Mates, the member of the Court of Auditors responsible for the report.
In its special report No 5/2016, “Has the Commission ensured effective implementation of the Services Directive?”, the Court rolls out a long series of observations on both transposition and monitoring of implementation. It flags up, first of all, the delay - a year after the directive was enacted - in translations of the “handbook” being made available in all EU languages, thereby hindering implementation.
In terms of monitoring, the European Commission did not gather data within a reasonable timeframe on the level of cross-border trade flows in the services covered by the directive - the construction sector, commercial services and tourism. “The Commission made commitments to the European Council as late as 2014 that it would 'reinforce its monitoring tools through more in-depth quantitative and qualitative reporting on sectoral and national reforms concerning services'”, notes the report. It is not possible, therefore, to evaluate the economic impact of the directive, the report concludes.
The Court feels, too, that the Commission has made too little use of the legal levers available to it to force dilatory member states to comply. The Court notes that the Commission made only one single referral to the Court of Justice of the EU. Furthermore, it believes that the time taken to deal with cases of infringement was too long (19.6 months on average). Lastly, the Court is critical of the lack of transparency around the EU pilot cases - pre-trial procedures particularly liked the member states because they are not public. The report calls for these cases to be opened as soon as a complaint is lodged and for resolutions to be published on completion of negotiations.
Little progress has been made and in some cases, on the contrary, the member states are moving backwards. In a 2015 report, the Commission showed that Hungary and Ireland had reversed the liberalisation process with regard to certain provisions in the directive. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)