Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-11-20-Speech-4-018"
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"en.20081120.3.4-018"2
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"Mr President, we all know that the European Commission’s accounts can never be signed off until – and unless – two major underlying problems are finally resolved. Neither of these problems is new. Firstly, there is no certainty about the opening balances for the accounting system, which was changed in 2005, because a year later there were huge readjustments which made it obvious that no reconciliation was, or is, possible.
Secondly, there is the problem of shared management, which has already been referred to, or in other words the distribution of public funds to recipients who are then held responsible for both using and accounting for them. Even the internal auditors in Member States admit that that system is impossible to operate.
For years, all we have ever heard – and we heard it again today from the Court and from the Commissioner – is well-intentioned talk about improvement soon, managing risk, error rates – trivia! The reality is that nothing substantial changes, and the public is losing patience, and rightly so. Tinkering with the deckchairs on this particular Titanic does nothing to plug the holes in the bottom.
If the Greek figures are to be believed, we still have olive groves in the Aegean Sea. The misuse of funds in Bulgaria is reported to be out of control. In Turkish-held Northern Cyprus, EUR 259 million of public money has been handed over for economic development, but the EU office in Nicosia openly admits it cannot monitor or control it, simply because we do not recognise the Turkish regime. Some of that money has just paid for new pavements in the booming holiday resort of Kyrenia, where the casinos do a roaring trade day and night. The local regime chooses not to raise sufficient taxes and takes the view that if the EU is stupid enough to pay for them, then that is fine by them. Yet that money could have been put to good use.
Not only are the accounts unacceptable, but some of the judgements on how public money is used are unacceptable too."@en1
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