Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-12-14-Speech-2-236"
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"en.19991214.10.2-236"2
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"Mr President, the Committee on Budgetary Control has passed all the candidates being discussed here. And we do mean passed, not just automatically rubberstamped. There have been candidates in the past that have been rejected by this House because there was some doubt as to their qualifications or impartiality.
Luckily, we have avoided such a turn of events this time even though, and I am betraying no secrets here
confidence has been placed in two of the candidates passed.
Allow me therefore to make a few basic comments on the Court of Auditors. The Court of Auditors too is in need of urgent reform as the result of enlargement. As Eluned Morgan has just said, the clearest way of going about this is on the basis of the number of members, as with the Commission. At present, the Court has 15 members, traditionally one per Member State, even though the Treaty does not expressly prescribe this. Fifteen members is five fewer than the Commission but, in the case of a relatively small institution such as the Court of Auditors, any further increase will make the Court much too top-heavy and unwieldy. That the Court is already unwieldy is clear from the overly prolonged procedure preceding the publication of its report. This needs to be addressed at the forthcoming intergovernmental conference. I should therefore like to argue for no further increase in the number of members of the Court of Auditors and, in this case at least, for the reverse, i.e. a reduction in the number of members, to be considered.
On the other hand, I take the view that the number of auditors available to the Court needs to be increased. In other words, to coin a phrase, fewer chiefs, more Indians!
In addition, and this is the second point which I should like to raise here, we must consider if the Court should not be allocated new tasks in connection with budgetary discipline. The crisis in the Commission now behind us demonstrated abundantly clearly that there is no effective mechanism for calling to account EU officials guilty of serious management errors or worse. This is mainly because the disciplinary procedure is an internal matter at the Commission, with officials sitting in judgement on other officials. So we cannot really blame those involved for taking a very, and unfortunately even excessively, lenient and forbearing an approach to cases from the outset. The only way out of this is to outsource these procedures to an external authority. What we need is a budgetary discipline division and such a division could well come under the Court of Auditors. It has the necessary competence in financial matters and it has the necessary independence. Mind you, this sort of reform would entail amending the Treaties. However, without such reform, all the announcements being bandied about to the effect that stricter action will be taken next time will just be empty words."@en1
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