The European instrument to support workers and enterprises in Member States affected by the crisis (SURE) and its €100 billion package borrowed by the Commission on the markets “were a prompt response to mitigate the risk of massive layoffs due to the coronavirus pandemic”.
But in a report on Wednesday 14 December, the European Court of Auditors ruled that the impact “on job-saving cannot be properly assessed because of the way the European Commission designed the novel tool, and because of a lack of good data at national level”.
Nineteen Member States have applied for SURE loans since 2020, and half of them have been in favour of Italy and Spain.
To learn lessons for future crisis tools, the Commission should now carry out a full assessment of the SURE support”, the Court adds.
While there is some evidence that the instrument has lived up to expectations, “the Commission’s claims of millions of workers having benefited from SURE support at the height of the crisis are not yet supported” by solid data and the overall impact of the instrument on the ground is “not established”.
A more thorough evaluation would also “assess the extent to which the risk of fraud has been minimised, given that all but one of the 19 Member States concerned reported irregularities and alleged fraud”.
Thirteen countries have taken legal action to recover misused funds. By September 2022, however, the Commission had still not opened any investigation at its level, on the grounds that “no major irregularity or fraud falling within its responsibilities had been brought to its attention”.
With the use of loans, the financial risk to the EU budget remains limited, the Court notes.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/4oe (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)