Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-30-Speech-3-190"
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"en.20010530.11.3-190"2
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"Mr President, recasting the Financial Regulation is a necessarily ponderous process. This regulation is not just a budgetary framework but is also a framework for the provision and financial supervision of accounts and for the duties and responsibilities of the main budgetary players. All of these issues were addressed in the same article of the Treaty, which stipulates the same procedures for all of them, but this does not mean that they should necessarily be dealt with in the same regulatory texts. The fact that their approval requires unanimity in the Council makes changing them even more difficult. Perhaps these reasons explain why this process has been dragging on since July 1996, when the Commission presented its first proposal for recasting the Financial Regulation. All the signs indicate that we are still to see a further stage added.
The concern to give fresh coherence to a text that has become a tangle of loosely defined rules and provisions therefore appears, of course, to be the most important one in the current round of redrafting. It is neither possible nor desirable, in this round of budgetary framing, to forget the relevant sectoral regulation, which concerns agricultural expenditure, the Structural Funds, research and development and external actions. Nor should we forget the important Interinstitutional Agreement on budgetary discipline. In this field, because it is neither politically nor legally acceptable to bulldoze existing regulations and agreements by adopting provisions that run counter to the Financial Regulation, we must reduce the specific rules in the sectoral regulations to the absolute minimum. We also need these to be properly linked with those of the Financial Regulation. Furthermore, we need to make the Interinstitutional Agreement compatible and bring it into line with the Financial Regulation and consider the need to include the Financial Regulation in any future revision of this agreement.
The second major issue concerns the Community budget system, organised into authorisations and payments, and the timeframes needed to implement them. The current system demonstrates weaknesses and problems with which we are all familiar, but there is no guarantee that the innovations proposed by the Commission – and even less those suggested by other institutions – will do anything to improve the situation. This is an issue on which a more thorough discussion is needed, based on a full and rigorous study of the workings of the current system. We hope that the Commission will devote the necessary attention to this in its future proposals.
Another extremely important point concerns delays in payments. Recently, the European institutions approved, at the proposal of the Commission, a directive that imposes harsh penalties on both public and private authorities that do not comply with the maximum payment delay of thirty days. How can the European institutions then seek to exempt themselves from the rules that they have approved for all of the Union’s other institutions, be they public or private? In this regard, I wish to point out that the Commission communication on this matter is far from satisfactory. Only a commitment by the Commission to lead by example in applying to itself the rules that it is proposing for others would be acceptable. By the same token, we Socialists consider it to be a point of honour that this Parliament’s political groups fully comply with all of the procedures that we approve in this Chamber for the Community expenditure of other institutions. We shall pay very close attention to the way in which each group approaches this matter in tomorrow’s vote.
Lastly, I must comment on the Council’s failure to reply to our repeated invitations to discuss the amendments to the Financial Regulation. It would be both absurd and unacceptable for the European Parliament, which is ultimately responsible for discharging the budget, to lose any power to act as a result of the rules governing this regulation. In these circumstances, all we can do is postpone delivering Parliament’s final statement on its position.
I wish to conclude by congratulating our rapporteurs, Gianfranco Dell'Alba and Michiel van Hulten, who have produced an excellent piece of work, and we wish to see this work continue in the same climate of cooperation in which it has been undertaken until now."@en1
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