Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-26-Speech-2-288"
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".
Within this question there are seven sub-questions, and I would like to be as precise and technical as possible because the questions were very specific and precise from an accounting point of view.
Your question mainly relates to our manning budget, where we are asking to create a budgetary line which would enable the Commission, where duly justified, to write off items in suspense accounts, and to write off losses which inevitably accrue in an administration manager’s funds in accounts throughout 145 countries, sometimes with a weak banking sector and other political disturbances.
The creation of this budget line reflects the Commission’s policy of administrative rigour and transparency, to clear up all
files, mostly relating to the years before 2000. That is mainly because we are now introducing a new accrual-based accounting system which allows us, and compels us, to be more transparent and more rigorous with our accounting system.
This proposal for a new budgetary line was presented in the amended Budget 5, to the budget line 40, and lists the following five types of operations which we will be looking into. The first is adjustments to cover amounts deposited in accounts in banks outside the European Union which have gone bankrupt during the previous year. The second is cash differences in imprest accounts. The third is settlement on some long-standing operations carried out mainly by delegations and representations under the imprest arrangements abroad. The fourth is repayments of principal and/or late payment interest and whether they were set off, and clearance of non-recoverable amounts of VAT.
Each year, the Commission will include this budgetary line in its PDB proposal, as it is now common practice to write off non-recoverable expenditure and not leave it in suspense accounts indefinitely, which was the practice in the past. The definition of a suspense account is that it is not just a bank account, but accounting records, in which the Commission’s annual financial statements are listed outside the EU budget accounts because they correspond to operations which are waiting to be regularised from an accounting point of view, but cannot be attributed by any specific EU budget line for various reasons explained above. There is therefore no link with the bank accounts mentioned in my answer of 2 July this year, where the accounts were opened or managed by staff other than the accounting officer, both inside and outside the territory of the European Union.
As regards the Court of Auditors’ 2005 annual report, this proposal also has no link whatever with that publication, other than the fact that the Court constantly presses the Commission to clear up these suspense accounts. It was presented in good time for the suspense account to be cleared up before the end of the present financial year. We did this with the amended budget.
As regards the main types of operation in a number of accounts which you ask about in your question and the amounts of money involved, I can provide some examples today. For example, funds lost following bankruptcies amount to about EUR 1.3 million, concerning mainly EUR 1 million in Kazakhstan in 1996. Funds lost from burdens of the past, for example, amount presently to EUR 3.5 million from imprest accounts held outside the European Union and only EUR 100 000 from imprest accounts held by representations. This is due to many different circumstances where the supporting documents that are needed to justify otherwise regular expenditure cannot be traced, despite long searches. All these amounts relate to years before 2000.
Finally, I just want to say that the creation of this budget line is not only part of the current process to modernise the Commission’s accounting system; it also reflects the Commission policy of administrative rigour and transparency to clear up all old files, which will become common practice from 2006, and we will do it every year.
Despite the thorough inventory, I want to confirm that no bank accounts were found that have been unknown to the Commission at this stage."@en1
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