Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-11-22-Speech-4-025-000"
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"en.20121122.7.4-025-000"2
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"Mr President, it is a great honour for me to present to this Parliament today the annual report on the implementation of the 2011 European Union budget. I will start with its main conclusions.
Member States and Parliament must now agree better rules for how European Union money is spent, and Member States and the Commission must enforce them properly. In this way, the European Union budget could be used more efficiently and effectively to deliver greater added value for citizens.
At the same time as considering the legislative proposals for the next financial framework period, European institutions and Member States are also engaged in setting up new European systems, mechanisms and governance arrangements in other domains related to public financial management, notably regarding the supervision of the financial system and the coordination of fiscal and economic policies.
The success of these initiatives will depend also on ensuring that the necessary democratic legitimacy and accountability arrangements are in place. In the Court’s view, appropriate public scrutiny and audit of all public funds put at stake to meet the European Union objectives is a key component that must be clearly safeguarded from the outset of such initiatives.
Ensuring sound public finances has never been more important for the European Union. The Court is committed to contributing, as best it can, to the European Union’s efforts to achieve this important goal, through our work and the Annual Report that I have had the honour to present to you today.
The 2011 accounts present fairly the financial position of the European Union, the results of its operations and its cash flows for that year. Revenue and commitments for payments were free from material error. However, payments were affected by material error, with an estimated error rate of 3.9 % for the European Union budget as a whole. The estimated level for 2010 was similar at 3.7 %. Put simply, the Court found too many examples of European Union spending not hitting the target or being used sub-optimally.
This Annual Report’s message is consistent with previous years. Despite an overall fall in the estimated error rate over the current programme period, there remains scope to spend European Union money more efficiently and in a better targeted manner in many different areas and schemes and expenditure programmes.
Overall, the control systems examined by the Court were found to be only partially effective and not realising their full potential to prevent or detect and correct errors. The two areas – or ‘policy groups’ – with the highest estimated error rate were ‘Rural development, environment, fisheries and health’, where the error rate was estimated at 7.7 %, and the policy group ‘Regional policy, energy and transport’, where the error rate was estimated at 6.0 %.
In these areas, as in all areas under shared management, national authorities operate the first – and most important – line of defence in protecting the financial interests of EU citizens. But the Court found many instances of control failure at Member State level. For example, in the majority of transactions in regional policy where the Court found errors, sufficient information was available for the Member State authorities to have detected and corrected at least some of those errors before claiming reimbursement from the Commission.
That said, the Court also found similar problems in certain areas directly managed by the Commission, including the policy group ‘research and internal policies’, where the Court estimated the error rate to be 3 %.
The Court notes in this report that the Commission’s directors-general have also recognised a high risk of error in rural development, cohesion and research. They increased their estimate of the spending at risk of irregularity from EUR 400 million in 2010 to EUR 2 billion in 2011.
There have been improvements over the current programming period, but there is still some way to go before European Union financial management is up to standard in all areas of the European Union budget. Many of the problems we have identified in the past still remain, albeit to a lesser extent. In fact, the fall in the Court’s estimated error rate for the European budget as a whole under the current framework shows that improving the rules and design of spending schemes from one period to the next does make a difference. And now, with legislative proposals for the next framework period under discussion, there is a golden opportunity to address their underlying causes.
For many years, the Court has called for single schemes with clearer objectives, easier-to-measure results, and more cost-effective control arrangements. This year’s Annual Report confirms this message."@en1
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