Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-08-Speech-2-012"
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"en.20030408.1.2-012"2
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Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as part of the discharge process the Commission and the other bodies, the other institutions too, have to give account to the freely elected European Parliament for the use made of Community budget resources. Parliament exercises control over this on behalf of the citizens of the Union. In the year 2001, EUR 79 400 million were spent from that budget. In addition, there was expenditure from the European Development Fund and the Coal and Steel Community.
We do, of course, also have the great advantage of having an independent public authority, the European Court of Auditors, as our external auditor. At a time when, in the USA for example, the public audit authority is being strengthened as compared to private auditors as a result of scandals such as the one surrounding Enron, it is clearly an advantage to have a public auditor who is obliged to remain independent.
In response to the questions from your general rapporteur about contracts with Eurogramme, the Commission has agreed to suspend all payments to Eurogramme for the time being and to review all contracts concluded with it. Contracts will be terminated wherever this does not entail additional costs. You are now urging the Commission to review all contracts concluded by the Statistical Office since 1999 by July this year as well. That is 2 660 contracts. It cannot be done by July. But because we want to answer Parliament’s concern, we will have to find a feasible solution here, for example on the basis of a sample. The Commission will present the Committee on Budgetary Control with a list of these contacts at a forthcoming meeting and suggest how we may take scrutiny further.
The events surrounding Eurogramme or Eurostat have also shown that cooperation with OLAF in information matters needs to be placed on a less ambiguous footing. OLAF is and remains master of the information from its own investigations, and, whilst OLAF’s independence must of course be safeguarded in everything it does, it has become clear that we must at the same time ensure that OLAF’s findings are promptly made available to the authorities that manage resources, so that measures to protect the Budget against fraud can also be taken in good time.
So far as the implementation of budget resources is concerned, I simply want to say a brief word here about the Sapard programme. Regarding the Sapard programme, the Commission has promised the Committee on Budgetary Control and Parliament that top priority would be given to improving the programme’s execution. My colleague Mr Fischler has already implemented some of the measures promised to the Committee on Budgets. On the very day before this House gives its assent to the enlargement treaties, every effort is required to make pre-accession aid at last effective for agriculture on the spot.
Thank you very much, Mrs Langenhagen, for your very positive report and your very positive remarks about the ECSC. You now have the report you reminded us about concerning lending activity, but it will probably not be possible to produce the publication you suggest about the ECSC’s activities since its formation in 1952 in all official languages by the end of this year because some of the posts have already gone to other services. But I fully agree with you that this experience and information about this important part of the history of the common European path should be available in all countries and people should be able to see how the idea of economic cooperation led to a genuine project for peace. We should indeed not allow this to be forgotten and we will see how we can take up this idea and find a feasible way of doing it.
Mr Blak, scrutiny of the agencies now covers a very broad spectrum of different activities, and your work, for which the Commission thanks you, was therefore very wide ranging. The new Financial Regulation stipulates that the creation of a new agency must be preceded by a cost-benefit analysis and I welcome the fact that Parliament wants to see this principle strictly applied, and with regard to existing agencies an audit in the course of evaluation for the cost infidelity analysis continues to be the best form, also of course being designed to avoid duplication. That is of course something of great importance when it comes to the use of scarce budget resources.
Regarding the external policy area of the Agency for Reconstruction, the Commission does not agree that there are sufficient grounds for an administrative investigation. But we will of course examine the things you mention and report back to you. In external policy over all, the Commission has complied with Parliament’s request to stop outsourcing tasks to the Technical Assistance Offices. The number of TAOs has been reduced from 126 in September 2000 to 12 at the end of 2002. This shows that here, we have taken the path that Parliament wanted. This has gone hand in hand with an appreciable change in the administration of ancillary aid programmes, namely deconcentration. This is also true of the European Development Fund, for which Mr Sørensen is rapporteur, and here, too, my esteem for your thorough report.
The Committee on Budgetary Control lays particular emphasis on the need for members of delegations to be adequately trained to perform the management tasks they are now required to undertake. The Commission produced a new manual for this in 2002 and the new Common Relex Information System for the financial management of external programmes, with the nice abbreviation CRIS, has now been introduced. Every delegation now has to submit an audit plan, which is intended to ensure adequate supervision of aid programmes.
In its White Paper on reform produced in the year 2000, the Commission made a list of all the measures necessary for the complete reform of the Commission. Eighty-seven of the 96 measures have already been taken, and the Commission has reported on them in detail. A guiding principle of this reform is the clear allocation of responsibility for the use of Community finance.
The Directors General now have to give an annual account of how the control standards have been applied. What public administration requires its institutions to publish such reports, in which the weaknesses also have to be described? What administration then checks, in full view of the public, whether the necessary measures have been taken to improve financial management? I believe transparency itself is a key element of the reform. The new Financial Regulation has been in force since 1 January 2003. This far-reaching reform is the fruit of the intensive work undertaken jointly by Commission and Parliament in 2001 and 2002, and I would also like to mention the Council at this point.
I would like at this point to thank the general rapporteur, Mr Casaca, for his very thorough and intensive work. On behalf of the Commission I would also like to thank the rapporteurs, Mr Staes, Mrs Avilés Perea, Mr Blak, Mr Sørensen and Mrs Langenhagen, for their thorough and conscientious work and I would also like to say how much I respect the Chairman of the Committee on Budgetary Control, Mrs Theato, for the way in which she directed this difficult process, and to thank all the members of the Committee on Budgets for their intensive work.
Reform of the accounting system is in full swing and must be completed by the end of 2004. This Commission will leave behind a service that is comprehensively and radically reformed and ready for the new challenges of enlargement. The Committee on Budgetary Control and this House have always supported and encouraged the Commission in this and with this discharge process Parliament has given renewed, and greater, impetus for reform.
In addition to the several hundred pages of financial statements, the rapporteurs and the committee also had to work through the annual report of the Court of Auditors and hundreds of pages of replies to the 267 questions that were put to the Commission, and the committee held hearings with eight members of the Commission.
The European budget covers a broad spectrum of expenditure programmes, from the marketing subsidy for dairy products to slaughtering premiums for cattle, bee-keeping subsidies, restructuring measures in the fisheries sector, youth exchange programmes and support for research in biotechnology, not to mention aid to provide schooling for girls in Afghanistan or food aid in Southern Africa.
All these programmes have different rules. Different players administer the programmes and handle the money, and the attendant risks of error also differ. The scrutiny performed by the Court of Auditors and Parliament took the whole range of these varied tasks into account. I must concentrate here, however, on a few points that proved the most important in the discharge process, namely the accounting rules and the book-keeping system, the contracts with the Statistical Office and the question of the rate of implementation of the budget.
So far as the accounts are concerned, the Court of Auditors has found that the 2001 revenue and expenditure account gives a true and fair view of the income and expenditure, and this is confirmed in Mr Casaca’s report. He has again called for reforms to the balance sheet. Mr Casaca’s report goes into the forthcoming reform in detail. In the Committee on Budgetary Control we had an opportunity to discuss the proposed reform and the specific steps involved in great detail. It is a project covering all services and all bodies. In some points our accounting is already exemplary, so far as publication is concerned, namely in that we publish the figures for the cash-based revenue and expenditure account monthly on the Internet. I mention this because the Commission’s proposal to oblige public limited companies to publish quarterly reports provoked lively debate as to whether that was reasonable. The Commission itself publishes its housekeeping figures monthly.
Compared with the Member States, when we look at some aspects of the balance sheet, too, we have nothing to be ashamed of. But is that enough? No, it is not. It must be clear from the accounting system whether a payment is a final payment or an advance payment that can be called back in if a programme does not go well. The accounting system must have an entry on both the assets and the liabilities sides as soon as a commitment is entered into, for example, and not wait until the payment has actually been made. Our accounting must be on an accrual basis. And the services that administer the resources must have direct access to the account status for their programmes. That is the only way to have very good financial management. It does of course present a challenge to the underlying information and technology system.
The Commission will of course gladly comply with the Committee on Budgetary Control’s request for a quarterly progress report on reform. We have also agreed to follow the suggestion of the rapporteur, Mr Casaca, of starting a pilot scheme where recipients of payments are informed in writing as soon as the payment has been requested by the authorising officer; this, too, will make for greater transparency. But it must be borne in mind that only 20% of the Budget is managed by the Commission and that in cash terms most of the Budget remains, in practice, in the Member States’ treasuries.
The European Court of Auditors examines the Commission’s cash management on an annual basis. We will nevertheless put before the Court of Auditors Parliament’s call for a specific external audit. We will also base the reform on the standards set in 2000 and 2001 by the International Federation of Accountants. But I would at this point also like to make one fundamental observation. In Old Europe – if I may put it that way – it has up until now been the case, for the European Union too, that the principal rules of accountancy were and are laid down by public law and not simply by the standards of an association of that kind. The fundamental question arises as to whether we want to depart from this practice. In my opinion, we should retain the practice that the public legislator has a part in deciding what principles must be applied for the accounts of the public budget."@en1
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