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Anti-fraud Commissioner blames member states for faulty accounts

The European Union’s (EU) anti-fraud Commissioner has blamed member states for the EU accounts again being declared faulty by the Court of Auditors, the union’s financial watchdog. The court concluded in its assessment of the 2010 accounts that while they “present fairly the financial position of the European Union… the payments underlying these accounts were still affected by material error, with an estimated error rate of 3.7% for the €122.2bn of EU spending.” This involved “breaches of public procurement rules, ineligible or incorrect calculation of costs claimed to EU co-financed projects, or over-declaration of land by farmers.” However, commenting at the European Parliament, Commissioner Algirdas Šemeta rounded on three (unnamed) member states, blaming them for these problems. He noted the court’s conclusions that in 2010, “the majority of errors concentrated on seven operational programmes in three member states. The Commission therefore considers that this is not in first place the design of the programmes that is wrong but how they are implemented on the spot.” Šemeta highlighted court concerns that in “the majority of cases, the member states’ authorities had sufficient information to have detected and corrected at least some of the errors…” The Commissioner declared: “This is unacceptable. It reflects a lack of responsibility and accountability of the authorities involved.”