Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-06-Speech-1-094"
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"en.20050606.14.1-094"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, although this report relates specifically to the budget year 2003, it is not intended as a snapshot; rather, it seeks to analyse failings and their causes over a longer period of time, to understand trends and learn from them for the future. We in the Committee on Budgetary Control are not contemporary historians; what we want to do here in this House is to prepare documents and adopt reports that will ultimately help to improve the fight against fraud and to improve the situation for European taxpayers.
I believe this is of quite particular interest in the run up to a new financial period, a new Financial Perspective. I would also like to say to those taxpayers here today that we must clearly understand, to take only one example, that so long as we have policies like the payment of export refunds in agriculture, there will be fraud. It is an open invitation to fraud and we therefore need to put an end to these policies. We ought to think about this in connection with the forthcoming Financial Perspective.
The year 2003 saw a slight decline in reported irregularities and fraud compared with the previous year: EUR 922 million compared to 1.15 billion. The long-term average is around 1 billion, far too much, of course, to be ultimately acceptable.
Looking back over the years, we find a decline in reported irregularities in agriculture, with an almost equal rise in irregularities in the structural funds. One reason for this may be that the increased controls in agriculture are having a visible effect – often at the expense of small European farmers, and that, too, needs to be addressed here. On the other hand, it may be because the amount of structural fund payments has increased appreciably in the last few years.
A second subject is recoveries – a truly timeless one, to judge by the European Court of Auditors’ latest report. I wonder what is the point of trying harder to prevent fraud if we have to wait decades for money that was wrongly paid out to be recovered. The Court of Auditors’ special report highlights the shocking scale of recoveries in agriculture. Between 1971 and 2004, EUR 3.1 billion of irregularities were reported in agriculture, only around one fifth of which were recovered. Some 70% of monies wrongly paid out have never found their way back to the EU budget. I believe there is reason enough for action here. The blame rests clearly with the Member States, and the European Parliament must make that clear. European money obviously ranks differently with the Member States than their own money.
One final point that is emphasised in this Parliamentary report on fraud is the question of combating cigarette smuggling. We learn that cigarette smuggling is causing us tremendous losses, that the Member States are not cooperating with the European Union as much as they ought and that the Member States, and their finance ministers in particular, are still clinging to an incorrect and dangerous tax policy, always increasing tobacco duties when they need to plug a gap in national tax revenues. That is an invitation to organised crime and we are all – Member States and the European budget – the losers. It will be up to us as the European Union to develop appropriate strategies to prevent it."@en1
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