While the UK and other Member States are struggling, in their battle with the European Parliament, to restrict increase in EU spending in 2012 to 2.02% on 2011 levels, the European Court of Auditors for the 17th year in a row has not signed the EU accounts.
On 10 November, the European Court of Auditors published its report on the implementation of the 2010 EU Budget. The ECA has confirmed the EU 2010 accounts as reliable. According to the Court “The 2010 accounts present fairly the financial position of the European Union and the results of its operations and cash flows for the year.” However, unsurprisingly, the Court has refused to sign off on how the money from the EU's 2010 budget had been spent. As Martin Callanan, said, "Another year, another report exposing the EU's abject failure to exert proper control over how taxpayers' money is spent.” In fact, year after year and nothing has changed; in the meantime taxpayers' money is being spent in a system that does not work. In fact, as this report shows, there are serious errors and mistakes in the system. The EU monitoring and accounting system is inadequate.
The EU spending continues to be affected by “material error.” The Court has estimated the error rate for payments from the €122.2 billion 2010 EU budget at 3.7%. There has been, therefore, an error rate increase from 3.3 % in 2009 to 3.7 % in 2010. This means that €4.6bn was spent against EU rules governing the spending, including, according to ECA “breaches of public procurement rules, ineligible or incorrect calculation of costs claimed to EU co-financed projects, or over-declaration of land by farmers.”
According to the Court cohesion, energy and transport policy policy area was “the most error-prone EU area of EU expenditure.” The error rate for spending in this policy group was high as 7.7%, and it was higher than in 2009. The EU’s Cohesion Policy, which represents almost a third of the budget, continues to be the area most affected by errors, in fact 49% of payments to projects were affected by error.
The Court has estimated the error rate for the Agriculture and natural resources policy group at 2.3% or €1.6bn. According to the ECA “the accounting rules and supervision have not been adjusted adequately.”
Moreover, the Court concluded that for these policy groups “The control systems tested across the EU budget were still only partially effective in ensuring the regularity of payments.”
The Court also concluded, the interim and final payments for External aid, development and enlargement and Research and other internal policies were subject to material error.
