EU anti-fraud commissioner seeks transparency

The European Commission is drafting an action plan to improve transparency in its infamously opaque accounting procedures. Associated proposals for legislative reform call for identification of European Union (EU) funds recipients. The EU’s new Commissioner for Anti-fraud Siim Kallas noted with disapproval: “At the moment, in most member states, data on end beneficiaries [of Brussels’ agricultural spending] are not publicly available”. National governments are jointly responsible with the Commission for ensuring that EU-funded agricultural programmes are properly managed, yet Denmark, for example, only launched a website that gives access to recipient data last June and Britain has just announced that it will be made available under the Freedom of Information Act. Kallas will work with the British government, when it assumes the presidency of the EU, on a detailed ‘Communication’ on a ‘European Transparency Initiative’, which is scheduled for release this autumn; a Commission white paper is to be published this spring. The documents will propose formal legislation and guidelines to cover structural funds spent on poorer EU regions, as well as farm spending. Kallas commented: “Information to the general public is often simply provided by erecting billboards on the sites of the projects. There is no monitoring of the quality and efficiency of the information”. Structural and agricultural spending account for 80% of the EU’s €100 billion budget.