EU agencies in the different Member States have adapted rather well to the unprecedented situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a report by the EU Court of Auditors published on Friday 29 October.
However, according to the auditors, weaknesses in the internal controls of some agencies still exist, and weaknesses in public procurement procedures remain the main source of irregularities.
The auditors examined the 2020 accounts of 41 EU agencies and other bodies. They validated the accounts of all 41 agencies as reliable and gave favourable opinions on the legality and regularity of the revenue for all of them.
As regards the legality and regularity of payments, the Court of Auditors gave favourable opinions in all cases except for ACER (Cooperation of Energy Regulators), eu-LISA (IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice) and ENISA (cyber security).
For these three agencies, they gave qualified opinions, mainly because of irregularities in the public procurement procedures and shortcomings in the delegation procedure for authorising budgetary operations.
In addition, the auditors identified 54 weaknesses based on the sample of transactions audited for 2020 (compared to 82 for 2019).
These weaknesses mainly concerned internal controls, public procurement procedures, human resources and budgetary management. For thirteen agencies (including Frontex, ACER, EASO, ESMA, ENISA, ETF and Eurofound), “we report weaknesses in internal controls related to the lack of ex-ante/ex-post controls”, the report states.
Finally, the auditors found a general increase in weaknesses in human resources management in the EU agencies. The slowdown in recruitment at the beginning of 2020, mainly due to Covid-19, is likely to create human resource bottlenecks in the future.
To read the report: https://bit.ly/3nHCMzp (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)