Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-16-Speech-2-053"
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"en.20000516.4.2-053"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, we are dealing with the first report sent to us by OLAF and I would like to thank Mr Bösch for the excellent work he has presented to us.
The most interesting parts of his work are surely those which refer to the subject of the report, that is to say 1998, and OLAF, the body which is presenting its first piece of work.
I agree that this report perhaps prejudges certain aspects which should be subject to further debates in the Committee on Budgetary Control and in this House, but I would like to highlight the positive aspects of its contribution.
With reference to 1998, I believe that we should recognise that, after having intensified the task of control, which should be initiated by Parliament and which OLAF carries out, the number of cases of fraud and irregularities has stabilised.
Without relaxing our efforts to control expenditure – of which we have shown signs in the past – we can see that this stabilisation has been the result of an increase in control. We should therefore be pleased about this and hope that this work continues, so that cases of fraud can be reduced rather than merely stabilised.
It is clear that, in fundamental fraud, there are discrepancies between what the Court of Auditors says and what OLAF says. In OLAF’s judgement, it appears that it is not in the Structural Funds that fraud and bad management prevail. It is other expenditure that we should be concerned about.
In any event, returning to OLAF, by means of this report, we should, in my view, ask for OLAF to be provided as soon as possible with the officials which have been allocated to it. However, I think it is very important that, in this first stage – precisely because we are interested in control – we do not increase OLAF’s scope of activity so soon after it has begun its work.
I understand that there are and there will be – although we hope that this is not the case – great problems with the counterfeiting of currency, trademarks or VAT. It is essential that we allow OLAF to continue to pursue its scope of activity little by little and that we expand its role at a later date.
Finally, we should not duplicate responsibilities. In order to use resources correctly, one body should be responsible for each issue and we should not have a situation where everybody is responsible for everything. I therefore believe that we should clearly separate objectives and not allow confusion to reign. At the end of the day "he that too much embraceth, holds little", as we say in Spain, so if we want to manage control, we cannot all have the same objective."@en1
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