Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-04-16-Speech-2-563-000"
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"en.20130416.51.2-563-000"2
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"Mr President, if any of what I am about to say sounds familiar, it is because we are in a depressingly familiar situation again this year. European taxpayers’ money continues to be wasted and the European Parliament is still being asked to grant discharge to accounts which are being condemned by the Court of Auditors.
ECR MEPs remain of the belief that until all of the European Union’s accounts are declared legal and regular, we, as elected representatives of European taxpayers, should not sign off any of the Union’s accounts. These accounts represent taxpayers’ money, not European Union institutions’, and they have a fundamental right to expect that their hard-earned cash will be spent wisely. That is why we will be voting against discharge this week.
When the Court of Auditors released its annual report last year, the European Commission’s official response was that the report showed that the situation was stable. In fact, the 2011 audit showed that the overall error rate had risen for the third year in a row – now up to 3.9%. If the Commission thinks that is a stable situation, then we have part of the explanation for the rising error rate. Complacency is breeding contempt for the public purse.
The EU’s agencies also continue to prove troublesome in their use of taxpayers’ money, with many serious problems with conflicts of interest and poor tendering processes being detected by the auditors. I am pleased that in one case – the European Environment Agency – the Committee on Budgetary Control agreed with us in the ECR that discharge should be postponed. This is the second year in a row that that agency has had its discharge postponed, and fixing the endemic failures and poor leadership at that agency is now vital.
The amount of money that the Commission considers to be at risk in the budget has quintupled, from EUR 0.4 billion to EUR 2 billion last year. This failure of oversight across the budget is the reason why we believe there needs to be a full-time budget control Commissioner in the next Commission term. Parliament has supported our position on this in the last few years and I hope will continue to do so.
Finally, at a time when every penny is under even greater scrutiny, it is time for this House to finally take a stand on behalf of our taxpayers and refuse discharge."@en1
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