Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-11-22-Speech-4-028-000"
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"en.20121122.7.4-028-000"2
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"Madam President, President Caldeira, Commissioner Šemeta, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to begin by thanking the Court of Auditors for presenting this annual report, our most important tool in the discharge procedure for the Commission’s budget. My sincere thanks for this transparent report, which I believe will do much to help us more forward.
There is room for improvement in regional policy too. We want retrospective projects to be removed from funding at last. We want the Directorate-General for Regional Policy to take the same robust action as the Directorate-General for Employment by suspending and cancelling funding programmes if Member States cannot guarantee proper and lawful control, and we want net corrections: Member States should only be able to transfer funds to other projects if they themselves detect errors in project management. If they are unable to detect the errors themselves, as is so often the case, the funding should revert to the Commission.
This report makes it clear that for the 18
time in succession, there can only be a limited statement of assurance for the work of the Commission, and as Mr Pieper has already said, the trend towards an improving error rate year on year has stopped.
This House abides by its demand, however: what we want to see is a clear trend towards an improving error rate in the implementation of the EU budget. We are not prepared to accept the present situation.
The Court of Auditors’ annual report also sends out a clear message to the Council, however, which is meeting this evening in order to find a compromise for the multiannual financial framework. Poorly functioning management and control systems in the Member States, overdue financial corrections at a high level, unnecessarily complicated rules in the Member States: anyone who wants better spending and does not use this as camouflage for cuts can start here.
Anyone who wants better spending must improve the controls in the Member States, not cut the budgets. Anyone who wants better spending must also do their homework in their own country, for in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the control systems, according to the Court of Auditors and the Commission, are only effective to a limited extent.
What concerns us about budget management in 2011 is that in some areas of the budget, the figures have got worse, as Mr Pieper has already pointed out. In research policy, for example – an area of the budget that is, in fact, directly administered by the Commission – the error rate has doubled from 1.4 to 3 %. Here, we must demand a plan of action from the Commissioner for Research, setting out how the Commission intends to reduce these error rates.
In the common agricultural policy, the error rate generally hovered around the materiality threshold of 2 %. Now, the Court of Auditors estimates the error rate in rural development to be an incredible 7.7 %, meaning that spending on rural development has by far the highest error rate of any area investigated.
We cannot be consoled by the explanation that the programmes in the Member States have now reached full maturity, or by the explanation that the number of development projects is also increasing, so the errors are rising as well. No, what we want to see here is a remedy, and the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development and Commissioner Cioloş should be resolute in their efforts to move Member States towards better controls, as has already been achieved in regional policy. This is a good example of how tackling the causes can have a positive effect.
The figure of 6 % for erroneous payments as a proportion of the total is still too high but the trend is moving in the right direction. The action plan adopted in 2008 has done much to improve the situation by greatly increasing the Commission’s supervision of the national management and control systems. Commissioner Cioloş should therefore start by seeking ideas for his own action plan to reduce the growing error rates in agricultural policy as well."@en1
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