Despite a well-developed institutional structure, the European Union’s fight against fraud is limited by major shortcomings in coordination and follow-up, argues the European Court of Auditors in a report published on Monday 15 December.
According to the document, while the mandates of the main players are clear and complementary, there is still insufficient exchange of information between them, and the European Commission does not have a complete picture of the amounts actually recovered for the EU budget.
As presented by the Court of Auditors, the EU’s anti-fraud architecture is based essentially on the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), which is responsible for administrative investigations, and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), which is responsible for criminal investigations into offences against the EU’s financial interests.
These two institutions are also supported by Eurojust and Europol, as well as by the national authorities, with Europol emphasising that it has already provided operational support for 158 EPPO investigations between 2022 and 2024.
According to the Court of Auditors, this division of roles is established within a precise legal framework and is not exposed to risks of confusion regarding competences.
However, it would appear that, in practice, the procedures for reporting and dealing with suspected fraud are considered to be “complex, cumbersome and inefficient”.
Between 2022 and 2024, OLAF and EPPO received around 27,000 reports of fraud, only a third of which were investigated.
Furthermore, the Court of Auditors’ auditors report that the European institutions report three times more cases to OLAF than to EPPO, and that in several Member States the number of cases reported does not correspond to their share of the EU budget, discrepancies which the Commission acknowledges and undertakes to examine.
These malfunctions are not without consequences.
“The Commission does not know whether all the amounts owed to the EU budget are actually recovered”, said the member of the European Court of Auditors responsible for the audit, Katarína Kaszasová, when presenting the report.
She stressed that the lack of information exchange “affects the number and speed of investigations, but also the Commission’s supervisory role”.
As far as the financial aspects are concerned, the results are mixed: over the period under review, OLAF recommended the repayment of €615 million to the European budget, but only €23 million had actually been recovered by the end of 2024.
For its part, the EPPO has frozen almost €3 billion in assets, while national courts have ordered the recovery of €232 million from fraudulent activities. However, the Commission has no systematic mechanism for verifying the enforcement of these judicial decisions.
In view of these shortcomings, the Court of Auditors is calling for advantage to be taken of the current review of the European anti-fraud architecture - “a golden opportunity”, according to Katarína Kaszasová - to introduce a new system for managing alerts, based in particular on a common database for alerts and more fluid information sharing, as well as better monitoring of the amounts owed to the European budget.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/k02 (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)