Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-20-Speech-2-415"
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"en.20040420.18.2-415"2
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".
Mr President, it concerns two matters. It concerns a number of agencies that we have looked at and, in particular, it concerns the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work in Bilbao.
I was extremely surprised when I read the Court of Auditors' report, because the Court of Auditors accuses this agency of having carried over far too much. On closer examination, it turned out that this was in connection with an SME programme that we here in Parliament had resolved on. It took some time to reach agreement with the Commission about where this programme should be implemented, but eventually it was decided to give it to the agency in Bilbao. That, of course, is no fault of the agency in Bilbao, but nevertheless the Court of Auditors made a very negative comment about this. It would, of course, have been very easy for them to check that. You ask yourself sometimes: is that so? We all knew it here and rapporteur Mulder has stated that in the final version of his report, albeit rather less bluntly than I am doing. It would nevertheless be good if the Court of Auditors did not only look at the first level, but also went into things a bit deeper. That is my opinion on this matter; apart from that there are no problems with the agencies that we are dealing with.
As far as the rest are concerned, we confined ourselves in the main to the Structural Funds. There is always a problem with that and that is the problem that Member States always over-estimate how much they can get out of the Structural Funds. That leads to a budget that does not balance, and that leads at the end of the year to money that has not been spent. This is especially the case at the beginning of a period. I think that the Commission needs to be a bit less naive in this respect. Up to now it was the case that when a new period started, we got practically nothing off the ground in the first year. It would be good, of course, if we could do better than this in the future. This point should be organised better in the future than it is now, otherwise it means that we never learn anything from the past."@en1
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