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The European Court of Auditors for the 16th year in a row has not signed the EU accounts
On 9 November the European Court of Auditors published its report on the implementation of the 2009 EU Budget. The Court has issued an unqualified opinion on the reliability of the 2009 EU accounts. According to the Court “The accounts of the European Union give a fair presentation of the financial position and the results of operations and cash flows.” Nevertheless, “payments from the budget continue to be materially affected by error, except in two areas of expenditure - Economic and financial affairs and Administrative expenditure.”
The Court gave unqualified opinions on revenue and on commitments and concluded that there was an improvement in the management of the budget. However, once again, the court has refused to sign off on how the money from the EU's 2009 budget had been spent. As regards the legality and regularity of the transactions underlying the accounts, the Court concluded that the level of irregularity is still too high.
According to the Court several spending areas in the budget continue to be materially affected by errors such as Agriculture and natural resources (56. 3 billion euro), Cohesion policy (35,5 BILLION EURO), Research, Energy and Transport (8,0 BILLION EURO), External Aid, Development and Enlargement (6,6 BILLION EURO) and Education and Citizenship (2,2 BILLION EURO). The Court estimated that payments, in these policy groups, are materially affected by error, being the error rate, estimated by the Court, between 2 and 5 % of payments made. However, for the cohesion policy the error rate estimated by the Court is above 5% (very serious). Moreover, the Court concluded that for these policy groups “The supervisory and control systems are partially effective in preventing or detecting and correcting the reimbursement of overstated or ineligible costs.”
The majority of irregularities are not fraud, nevertheless the Court will refer two cases to OLAF.
The Court concluded that the payments for Agriculture and Natural Resources were affected by material errors, which were higher than in 2008. The Court has pointed out “While some of the quantifiable errors concerned the eligibility of the expenditure, most were accuracy errors, resulting from over-declaration of eligible land.” According to the ECA the supervisory and control systems related to Agriculture and natural resources are only partially effective.
The EU’s Cohesion Policy, which represents almost a third of the budget, continues to be the area most affected by errors, “36 % of payments to projects were affected by error.” The Court has stressed that “the main causes of eligibility errors were the reimbursement of ineligible costs, and serious failures in applying the rules on public procurement.” Vitor Caldeira said that "The Court estimates that almost a third of the errors found on the interim and final payments tested could have been detected and corrected by member states before certifying expenditure to the commission, as the audit shows they had the information to do so..."
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