Today (8 June), the Economic and Financial Affairs Council, agreed on a general approach, without discussion, on a draft regulation amending Regulation 479/2009 as regards the quality of statistical data in the context of the excessive deficit procedure, granting auditing power to Eurostat. There wasn’t, therefore, a proper debate and the Council is set to formally adopt the regulation at a forthcoming meeting.
In 2004, the Commission put forward a similar proposal, but, at that time, the Member States could not agree to grant such powers to Eurostat. But presently, taking into account the current Greek situation and the lack of reliability of Greece’s public finance statistics, Member States are willing to have Eurostat and the Commission interfering in matters of their competence.
Under the Commission proposal Eurostat would have access to all “the information required for the purposes of the data quality assessment” and not just statistical information. Moreover, there would be more “regular statistical visits” and in-“depth methodological visits” in Member States. The methodological visits would go, therefore,beyond the “purely statistical data” as their purpose will be to verify the public accounts. Eurostat would have access “to the accounts of government entities at central, state, local and social security levels.”
According to the Commission’s proposal the methodological visits would only be carried out in “exceptional cases where significant risks or problems with the quality of the data have been clearly identified." However, how is this going to be interpreted? There is no definition of “significant risks and problems.” The details of the Council agreement are not known yet but, it seems that Eurostat would be ultimately able to directly compile statistics or control their production in the Member States.
The proposal is based on Article 126 (14) TFEU and unanimity is required at the Council, hence, the UK could have vetoed the proposal. According to the Daily Mail a UK official said: "We originally rejected this idea, but we've now discovered just how bad the Greek situation was, and there's an appetite to make sure it doesn't happen again. A lot has changed in the last few months, and people are ready to accept some things that they would not have done just a short time ago."
