The European Commission pinned down by the Court of Auditors

This is a warning that Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission would be wrong to overlook. In its annual report on the 2019 EU budget (159.1 billion euros), the European Court of Auditors issues, for the first time, an ‘unfavorable opinion’ on the correctness of expenditure linked to cohesion funds ( 53.8 billion euros for the economic catching up of the poorest regions), the CAP and fisheries (59.5 billion euros), and the sub-heading “competitiveness” (21.7 billion euros , particularly in terms of research and innovation). Note, the 2019 financial year was largely (11 out of 12 months) under the responsibility of Jean-Claude Juncker, the predecessor of Ms. von der Leyen.

This warning from the German President of the European Court of Auditors, Klaus-Heiner Lehne, comes in a context where the Commission will have to manage, in the years to come, an unprecedented sum with the current recovery plan of 750 billion euros of confirmation. This will have the practical consequence of doubling European funds over the next three years.

The complexity of the proceedings in question

These are operations, essentially reimbursement, that the Court qualifies as “high-risk expenditure” (of errors) because of the multiple eligibility criteria to be fulfilled, the multiple documents to be examined, and so on. The level of error for this type of transaction is “significant” and reaches 4.9%, above the threshold of 2% which the Court considers normal. This error rate was 4.5% in 2018. The Court proceeds on a test basis with 747 transactions examined for the 2019 financial year.

“This year that spending was on the rise and represented 53.1% of the population we examined, which is significant. Consequently, unlike the three previous years, the errors are generalized, which justifies issuing an “unfavorable opinion”, write the magistrates in the 2019 report, who recommend that the Commission simplify the procedures. The more complex the case, the greater the risk of error.

Nine cases of suspected fraud

More precisely, when the Court details the type of errors, 40% of them relate to “declaration of ineligible costs and non-compliance with agri-environmental and climate commitments (particularly in the CAP), 34% related to ineligible projects, activities or beneficiaries, 20% for serious errors in public procurement, grant award procedures and state aid, 4% for payments in the absence of supporting documents and 2% linked errors on the part of the Commission and other intermediary bodies ”.

The magistrates believed they had detected nine cases of suspected fraud (the same number as in 2018). The cases were forwarded to Olaf (the European anti-fraud office). He opened an investigation for five of them and dropped four others. “The cases of suspected fraud discovered during our work in 2019 and communicated by us to Olaf most often related to suspicions concerning the artificial creation of the conditions to be met to obtain EU funding, the declaration of costs not meeting the eligibility criteria, or irregularities in public procurement. Some cases of suspected fraud that we reported to Olaf presented several irregularities, ”the Court justifies.

The Court gives three examples

The Court’s report is supplemented with a few examples. In Hungary, the national authorities have approved a project to build a fodder silo. This type of aid is reserved for small farms. The beneficiary actually had a farm spread over 1,000 hectares… In Belgium, it is a farmer who obtains aid for the maintenance of a permanent meadow of high ecological value in order to spare birds nesting on the ground. But the beneficiary nonetheless mowed two plots in the nine areas of refuge… In Cyprus, an international organization responsible for supporting migrants wishing to return to their country of origin played with the figures of wage costs to pass a bonus of end of contract from which employees should not have benefited.