Brussels, 05/10/2007 (Agence Europe) - Improvements can still be made when it comes to preventing nepotism and protecting whistleblowers in the European Commission, some members of the European Parliament's budgetary control committee said on Thursday 4 October, following a two-day hearing taking stock of the reforms undertaken between 2002-2004 by the European administration commissioner Neil Kinnock, when the Commission was headed by Romano Prodi. The hearing was in preparation for the European Parliament's work on granting the Commission discharge for the implementation of the budget 2006.
“We are here to take a critical look at the administrative reform undertaken by the Commission and whether all the recommendations have been implemented” said Ingeborg Grässle (CDU), the EP rapporteur on the discharge of the budget 2006. “All these issues will come up again and be very important in the nomination of the next Commission in two years”, she said.
The former commissioner for justice and internal affairs, Antonio Vitorino, cited the imbalance in the posting of the human resources necessary to face new political challenges while at the same time other services are being broken up, as “one of the biggest challenges”. “The capacity of the Commission to get rid of certain activities is very limited for political reasons, often due to pressure from Council and Parliament”, he said. Mr Vitorino also underscored the difficulty of assessing the cost/benefit ratio and the quality of some policies: “it is very cheap to carry out a terrorist attack; its prevention has no price”, he added, clearly referring to the efforts deployed at Community level to resolve the thorny issue of security over the last few years.
Unsurprisingly, the issue of the budgetary responsibility of members of the Commission was the subject of the strongest speeches. Mr Vitorino appealed for “a periodical reporting mechanism, flexible enough to adapt to the key changing political priorities”, while at the same time underlining a recurring issue: “The problem is that the implementation of some of the functions rests solely with member states and this can disrupt the reporting assessment”.
This problem of “implementation” is due to the fact that the management of the EU budget is shared between the Commission and the member states, which are responsible for 80% of the management of European funds. As the budgetary responsibility within the directorates general falls on the directors general (who sign their services' summary reports), the national share of this responsibility, underlined by Mr Vitorino, is overlooked.
Some MEPs had already invited the commissioners to take responsibility. Jan Mulder (ALDE, Netherlands), the rapporteur on the discharge 2004, is one of them. “A civil servant cannot be held solely responsible, so the commissioner should co-sign the summary reports”, he said. In the view of Josef Bonnici, a member of the Court of Auditors, the commissioners may not sign the annual activity reports, but they still share the political responsibility. “I wonder if co-signing would help”, he said. There were also numerous sources of disagreement when it comes to protecting “informers” who report irregularities within the European institutions. The European Commission's chief accountant, Brian Gray, stated that there were sufficient rules in place to protect such people in the Commission. Paul van Buitenen (Greens/EFA, Netherlands) does not share this opinion: “Wake up, I receive so many Commission staff members in my office to denounce issues that I am compiling a nice file. That this is happening in Parliament shows that the Commission does not have sufficient procedures to protect whistleblowers”, the MEP said. The president of the Commission Central Staff Committee, Cristiano Sebastiani, said that Mr van Buitenen was right, arguing that there is a real lack of protection for whistleblowers. He also criticised the “nationalisation” principle whereby directors general are chosen by country using an informal system of “quotas”.
Nepotism and favouritism
When asked by rapporteur Grässle about “cases of nepotism in the Commission”, Professor Jan Wouters from the University of Louvain said that much could be done to improve the commissioners' code of conduct. To avoid conflicts of interest, the definition of nepotism should be extended to include “favouritism with regard to granting specific projects to relatives or friends”, as the current rules only deal with financial interests and activities, Professor Wouters recommended.
The Commission director general for personnel, Claude Chêne, considered the reform proposed in 1999 by the group of independent experts “very good in conceptual terms”, adding that he was “satisfied with its implementation”. He admitted, however, that decentralisation “comes with strings attached” as “it costs money and fosters bureaucratic procedures”. He concluded by saying that decentralisation is a good thing, but only if it is coordinated closely by central services: “It will only work properly if hearts and voices are singing the same song”.
“We have never been so efficient in organising an enlargement”, Mr Chène said in response to Boguslaw Liberadzki (PES, Poland), who asked him if José Manuel Barroso's Commission had postponed administrative reforms. “We have met all the goals from a human resources point of view, recruiting staff efficiently and fast. Targets had never been hit so well before”, Mr Chène said. (lc)