Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-22-Speech-2-299"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20021022.12.2-299"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:translated text |
"C
.
Mr President, I would like to return to some of the points that have been made. Let me first put something straight. The Court of Auditors may have had many criticisms to make of various accounting rules and of the system itself, but it always used to confirm that the completed accounts were a true and faithful record of income and expenditure.
Turning, secondly, to the question of the accounting officer's role, I am also grateful for the clarifications that have been given today. The accounting officer carries out the orders of the authorising authority, and the accuracy of the accounting system is his responsibility, but he is not the financial controller. On the contrary, it is important that financial management and accounting should be kept as separate tasks, and that the bookkeeper should not be involved in the management of funds' resources. That is not his job, nor should it be; on the contrary, it is for him to keep the books properly. This separation of the functions is important.
As far as the external advertisement of posts is concerned, the Statute – which, as you will be aware, is laid down by the Council – governs the sequence of events involved in recruitment. It does not prevent posts being externally advertised. It is the stages that we are dealing with here. I must, though, reiterate that the Financial Regulation stipulates that the accounting officer shall be an official of the Commission. Why is that the case? It is of course because this person opens accounts for the European institutions, which means that he or she is in a position of trust. That being so, one cannot but wonder whether the concealment of important facts in a job application could justify this position of trust.
It has been urged that the rules on accounting procedures should be clear. In the past, of course, we had very clear and simple rules, in that the entire public accounting system was based on what, in Germany, we term cameralistic accounting, in which the cash spent and the cash books – the actual outgoings and the actual receipts – are compared with what is in the budget. That is, of course, also the way in which the Commission and other offices administering public expenditure are accountable to the body which legislates on the budget. They want us to tell them how much of any given budget line they have voted has actually been spent on it. This accounting system will of course continue to play a part in the future, but this information is now no longer adequate for the purposes of management. For that, we need more information in the accounting system.
The Commission has therefore proposed, and the legislature has so decided, that we should go further along this Anglo-American road towards a system of accrual accounting, containing more rules and information specific to management functions. We will, however, have another opportunity to discuss these issues. Let me repeat that I would be more than happy to talk about these issues in the Committee on Budgetary Control, but, at this late hour, I will just thank Mr van Hulten again for the report and congratulate him on it."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples