Brussels, 24/11/2004 (Agence Europe) - On the day they took up their duties within the College of José Manuel Barroso, Commissioners Siim Kallas and Dalia Grybauskaite were heard by the parliamentary committee on budgetary control as part of the discharge procedure for 2003, on which the Parliament is to take position in April 2005. The MEPs asked them about the annual report of the Court of Auditors- published last week (EUROPE of 17 November, p.18). In this report, the auditors refused to grant the Commission the Statement of Assurance (SOA) for certain payments, most of which concerning sectors in which management is shared with the Member States. The MEPs were also able to question the two Commissioners about their new spheres of competence. From the point of view of the organisation and functioning of the Commission's services, few changes can be expected, said the Commissioner in charge of Administrative Affairs, Audit and the Fight against Fraud Siim Kallas, who promised a full audit of all European agencies by the end of 2006. Dalia Grybauskaite, Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget, spoke of the four areas under her jurisdiction: the accounting system, internal control standards, budgetary management and the reinforcement of the control of income. She also stressed the need to review the structure of the budget.
British Labour member Terence Wynn, rapporteur on the discharge of the EU's general budget for 2003, largely steered the discussions. He started by asking Mr Kallas about his influence in the choice of members for the Audit Progress Committee. Mr Kallas replied that he hoped to include Commissioners in it, and that Ms Grybauskaite would be one of them, and possibly his colleagues for Agriculture and External Relations. However, the presence of MEPs in a management committee strikes him as "not necessarily a good thing". Nor does Mr Kallas intend to operate structural changes within his services, because "I prefer not to have new units within my field of competence", which already covers two General Directorates, he explained. On relations between the Commission and OLAF, Mr Kallas spoke of his intention to clarify the situation, as the European Anti-Fraud Office has a "hybrid status". The appointment of the next director of OLAF, to take up his or her duties after March 2005, will be made "after consultation and in all transparency, but it is still too soon" to discuss it, said Mr Kallas, asking Portuguese Socialist Paulo Casaca to wait a few weeks.
On budgetary control, Commissioner Kallas aspires to "a situation in which the three institutions and the public can be certain that the EU's finances are being properly controlled in the absence of fraud". When asked about internal controls, he said that by 2006, the 17 European agencies would be audited, which a lack of funds made impossible for 2003, but he warned: "If [the agencies] increase, the question of resources will not go away". He said that any new creation in the Member States "must be studied carefully", and promised to be "critical", even though several Member States would like to house one. Mr Wynn wondered whether co-funding with the Member States (25% of expenditure, for example) might be a good way of improving controls on agricultural expenditure. Mr Kallas erred on the side of caution, but conceded that "co-funding would doubtless entail more discipline" and rigour. A representative of the Court of Auditors said that this was "no miracle cure, because the areas of the budget which are co-funded (such as the structural funds) show that there are still a great many mistakes". On the under-use of credits, Ms Grybauskaite warned that none of the Member States' forecasts could be "accepted as they stand", because the States tend "to forecast more than they need".
Speaking to the Lithuanian Liberal Ona Juknevièienë, who asked her how she foresees the structure of the Community budget in the future, Commissioner Grybauskaite said that she intended to assess the way expenditure is used for major Europe priorities, and the efficiency of this. For agricultural expenditure in particular, she said that these "are not more efficient and have no greater added value, except perhaps socially". This seemed to alarm Luxembourg Socialist Robert Goebbels, who asked: "And if this was the case, would it be a bad thing?". The Commissioner said that she was "not accusing the CAP of fraud", but that the "structure of the budget should be reviewed- not all of its priorities- to bring it into the 21st century". Like Edit Herczog (PES, Hungary), Mr Goebbels proposed a different reading of the budget, so that it is not seen solely from the point of view of fraud, and spoke out against ending up with a system with "more controllers than there are controls".