Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-04-Speech-4-007"
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"en.20031204.1.4-007"2
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"Mr President, Mr President of the European Court of Auditors, Commissioner, Members of the Court of Auditors, ladies and gentlemen, I wish to thank you, Mr Fabra Vallés, for your presentation of the Court’s annual report for 2002, and all the more for your having already presented this important document to the Committee on Budgetary Control a fortnight ago. Today, we can shed further light on certain aspects of the annual report and discuss them with you, and this begins our work on the discharge for 2002, on the foundation of the Court’s report.
In considering the points that you yourself have raised, let me begin with the Statement of Assurance. You have described how the Court has refined its auditing techniques still further, and this is something we very much welcome. The fact remains, however, that, because of an error rate that may well have differed from the preceding year’s, but was still too high, no positive statement of assurance can be issued in respect of 2002 as a whole. In the areas of agriculture, the Structural Funds, internal and external policies, only the receipts have been certified, and you give a clean bill of health only to the administrative expenditure.
So little was spent on pre-accession aid for the candidate countries that a positive statement of assurance does not say very much. Overall, I would say that this is an utterly deplorable result in terms of the quality of the Commission’s implementation of the Budget, even if much of the blame lies with the Member States. These aspects will certainly be reflected in Parliament’s discharge report.
Secondly, it is cause for gratitude that the Court has done what Parliament wanted and introduced a chapter summarising the implementation of the Budget and containing an overall view of the receipts and outgoings. Why, we ask ourselves, are there still such large surpluses in the 2002 Budget? They may well be only half the size of the previous year’s, but I regard EUR 7 billion in unused money not as a saving, but as a deficit resulting from action not taken and hence as a failure to meet the targets set. If, year after year, in the measures managed jointly by them and the Commission, the Member States over-estimate the funds required, the Commission has to be even more determined in taking counter-measures, something that it already does, albeit to an insufficient extent, but it could, for example, submit supplementary and amending budgets. The Court’s forthright advocacy of the idea that the administration of the Development Fund should be improved by including it in the general budget is precisely what Parliament has been demanding for some years now.
Thirdly, Mr Fabra Vallés, you spoke about the administrative reform and the internal audits, in which, in the light of the Eurostat affair, this House takes a particular interest. What you say sounds very positive but we doubt whether these reforms are really having any effect. Take the slogan ‘decentralising the way the Commission is run’, which, as such, I welcome. The activity reports and the guarantees given by the individual Directors-General are an improvement, but should they not also be signed by the office responsible for finance and personnel? Should there not be a clearer dividing line between the accountant and the authorising officer? Should the internal auditor, through his reports, also be in close contact with the internal audit service? The Court has devoted attention to the audit reports, but will it also cast an eye over administrative processes as a whole? The Committee on Budgetary Control will have other questions to ask about reform of the accounting and book-keeping system.
Over the next few weeks, our committee will have a lot of work to do in preparing the discharge for 2002. We are very grateful to you for supplying the documentation and information that we need and for the openness with which you and all the members of the Court of Auditors have cooperated with us. Let me just briefly say something in response to your closing remarks about the Intergovernmental Conference. You will be aware that Parliament – and, in this instance, the Committee on Budgetary Control, too – believes it to be of the utmost importance that the Court of Auditors should have equal status with the other institutions. That is why you will see from the documents that, as rapporteur, I appealed to the Intergovernmental Conference to add the Court of Auditors to the list of the various institutions, thus guaranteeing the Court its proper place and ensuring that the public can see that we have the instruments and agencies to watch over how the taxpayers’ money is handled."@en1
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