The European Commission is not correctly applying financial corrections designed to protect the EU budget against irregular spending in the area of Cohesion policy, according to a special report (https://aeur.eu/f/jke ) published on Thursday 20 November by the European Court of Auditors.
Although cohesion spending is affected by a significant number of errors year after year, it took more than a decade for the European Commission to adopt its first financial correction decision in September 2025 for the 2014–2020 period, the auditors noted.
The cohesion budget for 2014–2020, including the Recovery Assistance for Cohesion and the Territories of Europe (REACT-EU) initiative, totalled €404.8 billion.
The Member States bear the primary responsibility for recovering EU funds that have ben disbursed erroneously. If they do not correct this expenditure themselves, the European Commission must take action, which may lead to a definitive reduction in EU funds allocated to the Member State concerned.
According to François-Roger Cazala, the member of the Court responsible for the audit, the Commission “did not always implement financial corrections when necessary”.
The European Commission’s checks have led Member States to apply more than €1 billion in financial corrections since 2014. EU countries have also implemented almost €200 million of additional corrections in response to the Court’s observations. However, the auditors found that several of the proposed corrections had subsequently been reduced, or even abandoned altogether, without adequate justification.
For the auditors, the consistently high error rate observed in cohesion spending shows that the deterrent effect remains insufficient. They noted that, in sixteen of the cases examined that met the conditions, the European Commission had only launched the recovery procedure twice by September 2025 and that the mandatory net financial corrections had not yet been made.
The Court’s analysis of the Commission’s checks on ten countries shows that it took an average of 588 days before the procedure could even begin. Once launched, the process takes more than two years. According to the auditors, such long lead times – between three and four years in total – make it impossible to respond quickly and manage finances rigorously. Furthermore, the 2021–2027 legal framework does not offer any significant improvements. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)