While the UK is struggling to reduce in real terms the next MFF 2014 – 2020, the European Court of Auditors published its report on the implementation of the 2011 EU Budget. The European Court of Auditors for the 18th year in a row has not signed the EU accounts. Brussels is clearly wasting taxpayer’s money and the European Commission has the nerve to ask for a ludicrous increase on the new MFF.
The ECA has confirmed the EU 2011 accounts as reliable. However, unsurprisingly, the Court has refused to sign off on how the money from the EU's 2011 budget had been spent. In fact, this report, and previous reports show that there are serious errors and mistakes in the system. In the meantime taxpayers' money is being spent in a system that does not work.
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 € 129.4 billion 2011 EU budget at 3.9 %. There has been, therefore, an error rate increase from 3.3 % in 2009 to 3.7 % in 2010 and 3.9 % in 2011. This means that €5bn was spent against EU rules governing the spending. Vitor Caldeira, president of the European Court of Auditors said “…the court found too many cases of EU money not hitting the target or being used sub-optimally".
According to the Court, rural development, environment, fisheries and health policy group was “the most error-prone EU area of EU expenditure”, as the error rate estimated by the ECA was 7.7%.
The euro rate estimated for spending in regional policy, energy and transport was 6.0 %.
According to the Court “Member States and Commission control systems examined were only partially effective in ensuring the regularity of payments. Control systems are not realising their full potential to prevent or detect and correct errors.”
