Brussels, 11/09/2001 (Agence Europe) - On Monday, Commissioner Michaele Schreyer addressed the EP's Budgetary Control Committee to give a progress report on preparing the 2001 Budget in line with the objectives set by the European Commission through the adoption of a budget implementation plan which involves ensuring that the budget implementation process does not end as late as 31 December (but rather at the beginning of October) and that a good balance is installed between commitment appropriations and payment appropriations.
The most recent statistics available (which cover the period until the end of July) show that EUR 79 billion was implemented as commitment appropriations, which is the equivalent of a 76% use rate in 2001 (compared with 49% in 2000). EUR 52 billion in payment appropriations was implemented, which is the equivalent of a 57% use rate (almost the same as in 2000), in other words EUR 4 billion less than in the implementation plan. Ms Schreyer stressed that commitment appropriations were below the forecast amounts under the following headings: internal policies (-EUR 200 million owing to implementation problems with the Research and Development programmes); external policies (-EUR 300 million); structural actions (-EUR 470 billion as a result of ISPA, the Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-Accession, where environmental improvement and transport infrastructure projects in candidate countries were presented late). As for payment appropriations, the implementation of the structural actions budget displays an under-utilisation of EUR 3.1 billion (against the plan), owing to delays in adopting the new regional policy programmes (Ms Schreyer explained that Member States have to present their payment requests in the autumn).
Ms Schreyer pointed out that the qualitative and quantitative analysis of budget implementation had improved since the Commission had started sending MEPs on the EP's Budgetary Committee and Budgetary Control Committee a summary of the implementation of the budget every three months in electronic format.