Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-04-Speech-3-011"
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"en.20021204.2.3-011"2
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"Mr President, Mr President of the Court of Auditors, honourable Members of this Parliament and of the Court of Auditors, I wish to extend very warm thanks to Mr Fabra Vallés for his speech and for his firm support for Commission reform. I wish to thank all the members and staff of the Court of Auditors for their good cooperation throughout the year and for the Court's recommendations, which are indispensable if the European Budget is to be put to good use and properly administered. With the Statement of Assurance specifically in mind, I am also grateful for their frankness about the methodology applied.
Turning to the third area – that of the reforms – the measures taken by the Commission are many in number and far-reaching in their effects. You will be aware that, in the area of the Budget, activity-based budgeting is changing the way in which the Budget is drawn up. Another major change is the strategic planning using the Annual Policy Strategy within the Commission. The offices of the Internal Audit Service and the Central Financial Service have been set up in the same way
The most crucial aspect, though, is the decentralisation of responsibility and accountability, as described by the Directors-General in their report. This must show whether the objectives set out in the Budget have been achieved, and whether a declaration on the financial management can be given, stating that all the control measures had been set up and were up and running.
This too involves new structures, such as annual reporting for example. We did this for the first time in 2001, and the Court of Auditors is right to point out that the statements by the Directors-General still differ in too many respects for them to be able to serve as a basis for some sort of Single Audit Concept. This is an observation with which the Commission concurs, and that is why we will shortly be deciding on appropriate improvements, which we will authorise the Directors-General to carry out.
There is one suggestion in the Court of Auditors' report that I particularly want to pick up on, one that will also be important in terms of the work done by the Committee on Budgetary Control, and that is the suggestion that the annual reports by the Directors-General should include a specific position statement on which of the Court of Auditors' recommendations have already been put into effect and which of them still require action to be taken. This would reduce the number of possible criticisms; this is a very good, indeed essential proposal, and one that we shall adopt. It will make the Budget Commissioner's work easier, as also that of the Committee on Budgetary Control.
Let me take this opportunity of congratulating the Court of Auditors on its twenty-five years of existence, and also, on behalf of the Commission, to again thank it very warmly for all the work it has done. I would also like to address a few words to the principal rapporteur, Mr Casaca. Work on the discharge procedure has already begun, and the questionnaire you have submitted is a comprehensive one. For its part, the Commission will do all it takes to give you satisfactory answers in due time, that is to say by 18 December. The questionnaire also makes clear, Mr Casaca – and you can tell the committee this from me – that the cooperation involved will, in my view, be not only thoroughly in-depth, but also very good.
I will follow Mr Fabra Vallés in concentrating on three points, specifically the surplus from 2001, accounting, and Commission reform. The Court is critical of the EUR 15 billion surplus for that year on the grounds that it is not the result of savings – which would have been a good thing – but has come about because the Budget provision on which Parliament had decided had not been fully used, and because programmes, especially in structural policy, had simply got going more slowly than had been planned. The surplus represents the difference between the estimates and cash data as set out in the revenue and expenditure accounts, in line with the accountability required by Parliament.
Why was there such a great discrepancy in structural expenditure? In this area, the Commission always relies on proposals and predictions by the Member States, and in this instance we were working on the basis of assumptions that were simply unrealistic. I told the ECOFIN meeting yesterday, and not for the first time, that there is still, in the Member States, no systematic procedure for estimating, on a sound basis, how much in the way of resources can actually be drawn on in a financial year. This is where the Member States need to work together with the Commission on improving forecasting, which may be helped by our now presenting the Member States' forecasts to the Parliamentary Committee.
The Financial Regulation requires that any surplus from a financial year be credited to the Member States as income for the following year. We have done this principally by way of two supplementary Budgets, an instrument that also featured in discussions on the Financial Regulation.
Turning to the accounting standards, the Court has, as in previous years, again observed that the annual accounts for the financial year 2001 gives a true and faithful picture of revenue and expenditure, and of the Community's financial position at the end of the year. The Court subjects the financial management including of course the cash position, to detailed scrutiny. It is, then, quite simply wrong to assert that the Commission's books and cash position have not been audited for ten years! The Court examines in detail the accounts and the standards by which they are kept. The Court has again expressed reservations about the balance sheet, and is calling for further changes to be made to the system.
As you are aware, the new Financial Regulation requires all the institutions, with effect from 2005, to have one single balance sheet relating to specific periods, a requirement that also applies to Parliament. Having gained the impression that there is confusion about this, let me follow the President of the Court of Auditors in making a basic observation to clarify matters. Public sector accounting is, by tradition, cash-based, in the sense that it involves the recording of revenue and expenditure over against the Budget estimates arrived at by the body legislating for the Budget. This system is therefore in line with accountability to the budgetary authority. In some Member States, financial management continues to be founded on this principle, and there is no truth in the claim that this type of cash accounting is inherently susceptible to fraud. This sort of information is not, however, sufficient for administrative measures aimed at efficiency, and that is, as it has been emphasising for years, what the Court of Auditors is concerned about, and it is also a matter for concern for the Commission. There is a close connection between the adoption of commercial standards in the public sector and the overall reform of administration within the Commission, and also in some Member States in particular.
It is these aspects that have such a great part to play in the Budget, and especially in the balance sheet, but the budget-spending centres must be able to get more information from the accounts. We have committed ourselves to continued development, which the Court has also expressly enjoined on us, including improvements to the underlying computer system. Our accounting system is computer-based and capable of performing to the highest standards; I might add, by the way, that the budget-spending centres in all the Directorates-General and in the representations are linked together in a system of which some Member States can only dream. This too has been the subject of false allegations to the effect that 4 000 officials were able to carry out transactions directly and, as it were, on their own authority. That too is untrue. They are obliged to feed everything into one single system, and the Budget Directorate-General then carries out the actual transactions. A number of steps have been taken to improve this. This year, we have also been concerned to introduce improvements in the area of security, specifically concerning access by system managers, which the Court of Auditors had drawn our attention to on numerous occasions.
Every year, Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control has the important task of checking the financial statement, and, should you need help in this, it goes without saying that my staff are always at your service. Mr Elles, if your group has come to the decision that it should seek help from elsewhere, that is manifestly its own business. As far as the hearings of a suspended official are concerned, the Conference of Presidents had given this matter their attention, and, when the official raised a query, it was to that and also to the proceedings currently underway that her attention was drawn – nothing more than that.
To summarise, I would like to thank Mr Fabra Vallés again for observing that the Court of Auditors, on the basis of rigorous and professional audit work, has confirmed the reliability of the Commission's accounts. The Commission is currently finalising a detailed framework for further modernisation of the accounting system that will take on board the very suggestions and criticisms that the Court of Auditors has made, and I will be able to present this to Parliament in January."@en1
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