Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-04-26-Speech-3-167"
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"en.20060426.15.3-167"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the European Parliament has the important task of granting discharge for the financial year 2004 to 14 European agencies that are fully, partially or indirectly subsidised by the European Union. I shall not dwell here on the specific details or the problems that were found in each individual agency; I shall confine myself to mentioning those items that have emerged as the main points for a joint debate.
Many of the issues that have come up are recurrent, and we can therefore talk of a cross-cutting analysis of issues that have emerged across the various agencies. One such issue concerns the Financial Regulation, which was devised for the agencies, while the subsequent financial regulations specific to each agency were designed to adhere as closely as possible to the general Financial Regulation created by the Commission.
Although this criterion is generally valid, it is sometimes not suited to the smallest agencies, for which appropriate reforms will be needed. That is one of the main objections made by the Court of Auditors. Personnel selection problems are also common to several agencies, since the agencies certainly require greater assistance than larger institutions. I therefore think it is important that the Commission should make the services of EPSO, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Personnel Selection, available to them, as well as supplying other cross-cutting services such as training and the legal service.
Another problem concerns internal audits, which for some agencies are an excessive burden. I therefore believe the Commission should table a report on the current situation, describing both each agency’s current capacity for performing an internal audit and the internal audit services that the Commission can make available to the smallest agencies.
Lastly, I shall focus on an issue that has generated heated debate and has marked a divergence in thinking between Parliament and the Commission. The issue concerns the European Agency for Reconstruction, which was set up in 2000 to provide assistance for reconstruction, development and stability in the regions of Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia through the CARDS programme. Since the programme has come to an end, the Commission has decided to close the Agency by the end of 2008.
In view of the excellent work it has done in recent years, and in order to prevent the precious experience built up over many years of activity from being lost, I have in my report proposed extending its mandate so as to be able to use the agency to provide reconstruction assistance wherever required, for example in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or even the countries recently affected by the tsunami. This would be in addition to the immediate humanitarian assistance provided by ECHO, the Commission’s department set up to help in the event of natural disasters or armed conflict in regions outside the EU. Well, then, I think that is more or less what there was to say about the report, which I hope will be adopted during the next sitting.
I take this opportunity to highlight what I have just said, which is that discharge is given to just 14 out of the 27 agencies that exist. Indeed, I wonder how many of you are actually up to date with how many such bodies there are and what their real functions are: not many of you, ladies and gentlemen, and I am sure that very few European citizens have any clear ideas on the subject. It might therefore be worth developing information campaigns for them about the agencies and their functions.
It is no coincidence that, after the debate on my report in committee, a study was commissioned – it is still under way – to analyse and clarify the situations of the European agencies. The study is revealing what has already emerged from the report, namely a lack of harmonisation among the various agencies, and the likelihood of poor transparency associated with difficulties in Parliament’s control over them.
To that end, I have called on the Council in my report to start talks as soon as possible to conclude the draft interinstitutional agreement, which the Commission put forward at Parliament’s request. In the discharge report on the agencies for 2003, Parliament actually called for this institutional agreement to be set up in order to place all the agencies within a common regulatory framework.
With regard to Parliament’s powers to grant discharge, I have tried to underline the unfairness of the current situation and would recall that, under Article 185 of the Financial Regulation, Parliament gives discharge for the implementation of the budgets of the bodies set up by the Communities that have legal personality and actually receive grants charged to the budget.
In reality, it is important to note that not all of these bodies are fully or even partially funded via grants charged to the budget. The conclusion may therefore be drawn that the discharge decision covers both the budget and the non-budget funding of these bodies. The situation is clearly unacceptable, and it implies that some of the bodies set up by the Union are accountable for the way they spend income received from sources other than the budget, whilst others, which do not receive a subsidy from the budget, are not.
An amendment to the Financial Regulation that was proposed by me and adopted by the Committee on Budgetary Control has introduced this very principle. If the Regulation thus amended is adopted, Parliament will see its powers of control greatly expanded in the coming years, to the benefit of the principles of transparency and democracy.
The analyses carried out by the Court of Auditors were of great help in drawing up the reports. They revealed a few irregularities of very little significance, and I therefore endorse the decision of the Court of Auditors, which proposes granting discharge to the directors of all 14 agencies analysed. I am sorry to say, however, that the analysis that the Court was asked to provide is purely technical in nature, and there has been no control of the ways in which the allocated budget has been spent during the current year.
I have stressed this point in the working document accompanying the reports, where I propose that in subsequent years the Court of Auditors should supplement the current assessment with an evaluation of service quality, competences and activities: in other words how efficiently the individual agencies spend their budgets."@en1
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