Strasbourg, 04/04/2001 (Agence Europe) - Following its rapporteur, German Social-Democrat Jutta Haug, the European Parliament approved, with a few amendments, the draft modifiation to the regulation on the use of ESA 95 (revised system of integrated national and regional accounts) in determining financial contributions to VAT-based own-resources based on VAT (see summary in EUROPE of 2 April, p.16). Going beyond the fairly technical framework of this proposal, Parliament called in particular for the issue of the collection of own-resources and the level planned for own-resources for the next financial year to be included on the agenda of the budgetary trialogue: so far, the rapporteur stressed, the "revenue" chapter of the budget has not been examined in this context, whereas a debate on revenue is very useful for the establishment of the budget of the following year, notes Haug in the report.
The European Commissioner for the Budget, Michaele Schreyer did, however, say that she could not agree to this amendment, whereas she was prepared to respond to Parliament's request to receive more information concerning the collection of own-resources. Parliament also made a point of stressing that the use of data based on ESA 95 to determine VAT-based own-resources had no impact on the level of own-resources or on the distribution of contributions between Member States.