The European Court of Auditors (ECA) highlighted shortcomings regarding the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) in a new report published on Thursday, 7 November, that assesses the work of the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA).
The report states, “We found shortcomings in the otherwise well-organised CEF selection procedures, risks in programme implementation and weaknesses in performance reporting”.
As regards selection procedures, the ECA laments that the degree of correlation between the assessment of a project provided by external experts and the Commission’s final decision to allocate funds to the project varies depending on the CEF sector. The auditors therefore advise that these procedures be further standardised across all three CEF sectors (transport, energy, and digital), that the reasons for departing from the experts’ assessment be better documented, and that the award criteria used to select projects be further clarified.
The auditors specifically point to “CEF Transports”, for which the probability of a recommended project being selected is independent of the scores given by the experts. As a result, 14 projects in this CEF sector were selected by the Commission even though the experts had not recommended that they be funded.
The ECA also highlights the excessively slow allocation of funding due to delays in project implementation and to under-execution of projects. Consequently, in January 2019—5 years after the start of the programme—less than a quarter of the funds allocated to projects had been disbursed.
Moreover, with regard to evaluating project performance, the auditors lament that INEA focuses its monitoring procedure exclusively on the project implementation phase. Consequently, there is no specific information as to whether the projects co-financed by the EU have produced the expected results and how they have done so.
To consult the report: https://bit.ly/2pPK9uU (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)