Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-17-Speech-2-193"
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"en.20021217.6.2-193"2
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".
Mr President, I will now answer Mr Blak’s question. Every year since 1994 and again, too, for the 2001 Budget, the European Court of Auditors has found that the books and financial statement are a true record of the European Union’s revenue and expenditure and also accurately show the financial position at the end of the year. At the same time, the European Court of Auditors has repeatedly urged us, as regards the capital account, to go over to a new system that does not wait until a payment or receipt has been made before recording financial transactions, but records them when a claim is raised or a commitment entered into. That is an important step, which is now enacted in the Financial Regulation.
In the past few years – and this brings me to Mr Heaton-Harris’s question – we have already taken steps towards this capital account. Then, of course, a lot of information about our claims and commitments came from outside the bookkeeping system. For example, we asked ourselves what the Commission’s future obligations were with regard to pensions for its officials. That was information that was obtained and processed by the Directorate-General for Administration and then fed into the accounting system. This information was not derived from the annual budget. Take another example, which also applies to the Parliament’s budget. Take the fixed assets, this building for example. The budget account contained only the expenditure made in a given year. If you like, the assets were then no longer contained in the accounts, or they had to be brought into them again at an appropriate valuation. For the future we plan – and this is how it is being introduced – that the information will go from the annual budget directly into the capital budget. Then we will know what the European Union’s assets are and we will not have to introduce them separately.
I must point out that unfortunately we cannot simply draw on best practices in the Member States. Some Member States – and we discussed this repeatedly in the Committee on Budgetary Control – have taken steps in this direction, but at the same time the Member States also have different problems. Municipalities, for example, own infrastructure, and you might therefore say that they have different assets than we do and have to value them differently. If – and this is new – for example securities that contractors have to lodge when they take part in a tendering procedure or the tender has been accepted now have to be shown in books, then we have to take new decisions. The international standards are, if you like, principles, but they must, as it were, be tailored to the specific budget, to the specific tasks that we have in the budget, if they are to be made to work. That will also be decided by this Standards
Committee. If that produces good results, I think that might in future be something that the Member States or third countries will be able to take over from us."@en1
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