In a new report published on Thursday 6 July, the European Court of Auditors says that the European Commission and the bodies responsible for managing EU funds are finding it difficult to go digital, despite the European Commission’s digital strategy launched in 2018, which aimed to go “fully digital” by 2022. According to the report, it is particularly difficult to standardise the various IT systems and databases in order to improve their interoperability.
“Operational expenditure under the EU budget is managed using numerous IT systems, which need to be harmonised and simplified to improve interoperability and transparency”, said the person responsible for the report, Laima Liucija Andrikienė, a member of the Court of Auditors. “To make matters worse, EU rules do not require Member States and managing bodies to standardise their use of shared IT tools to protect EU spending”.
The auditors examined direct management (by the Commission or other EU institutions/bodies), indirect management (by the Commission’s partner organisations or other authorities, inside or outside the EU) or shared management (by the Commission and Member State authorities jointly) of programmes financed from the EU budget.
While the Commission has largely digitalised the Member States’ payment systems, for area-based payments in the agricultural sector, for example, the IT tools used by the Member States vary widely for cohesion and rural development funding.
“As these tools are generally not integrated into EU systems, there is no way of efficiently exchanging useful information on the beneficiaries of EU funds”, the report points out.
Although the Commission has an online portal containing information on contractors and beneficiaries of EU funding, the auditors believe that it lacks transparency and that transparency could be increased by introducing a unique identifier that would make it possible to search for these contractors and beneficiaries of EU funds across all tools and systems.
Finally, the report highlights the fact that it is currently impossible to carry out a complete audit on all EU budget expenditure or on a specific field of action.
With regard to the request for transparency, the Commission has developed Arachne, a data analysis and risk assessment tool that all national authorities can use to verify funds under shared management, but its use is optional. While the Commission has proposed to make it compulsory and to extend the transparency provisions, the changes would only take effect from the next programming period, in 2028.
To see the report, go to : https://aeur.eu/f/7yc (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)