Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-16-Speech-2-008"
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"en.20010116.2.2-008"2
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"Mr President, the van der Laan report gives a clear overview of the measures which the European Commission has taken further to observations made by Parliament in the context of the 1997 discharge. From that point of view, my group will support the report, and I would congratulate Mrs van der Laan on her achievement.
However, I would like to point out – and that is also mentioned in the report – that although some progress has been made in five areas, they have a long way to go yet. This applies to the closure of accounts, improving institutional management and control problems, the technical assistance offices and the fight against fraud and corruption. I will not go into all these areas but highlight a few.
I believe it is of utmost importance for the Commission, in its attempts to reduce the unacceptably high percentage of error, to identify the Member States which fail to achieve any improvement in the percentage of error in the case of the biggest expense items, for example. The Member States will obviously not like this, but why could we not keep a scoreboard for this, just as we do for the Member States’ performance rating in terms of implementing European legislation? The more transparency, the better. An added benefit is that the national parliaments can bring their governments to book. In the fight against fraud and the careless handling of European monies, we must rely far more on cooperation with national parliaments. The trust of the citizen in the powers that be, and specifically in the European Union, is at stake. It cannot be that we here in Europe get the blame for the negligence and carelessness of national governments.
In the near future, the Commission will need to pull out all the stops in order to set up an efficient management and control system. We will soon be discussing the new Financial Regulation which, I hope, will better accommodate the requirements of modern management. Continuity, transparency and clear competences are vital parameters in this. We must avoid a situation where different bodies responsible for fighting fraud and corruption, such as OLAF and the financial irregularities panel, cancel each other out in their efforts. There is nothing worse than having investigation offices putting all their energy into mutual competence-based squabbles.
Finally, we set great store by the Court of Auditors systematically examining the annual reports to see how the Commission has acted upon critical remarks made previously. Control without referring back to errors detected previously is a job half-done."@en1
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