Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-21-Speech-2-142"
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"en.20090421.19.2-142"2
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"Mr President, I am impressed that you at least attempted to list all of these decentralised agencies. There are, of course, a very large number of them. I would maintain that discharge has become even more important for the EU agencies precisely because they have increased in number. The budget and the number of staff have also increased.
The number of agencies has increased from 11 in 1995 to a total of 27 today. In 2007, the budget for all the agencies was EUR 1 243 500 000. In 1995, the average budget for one agency was EUR 7 million, whereas now it is over EUR 22 million. Staff numbers have increased just as dramatically. In 1995, 38 people, on average, worked in each agency. Today, that figure is 155. In my opinion, this increase is remarkable in itself and something we need to reflect on, namely the question of whether this is an appropriate instrument and whether this type of increase is reasonable. It also places higher demands on us when discussing discharge, requiring us to spend more time and energy on it.
We have therefore chosen to deal with 21 of these agencies that we are responsible for in separate reports and also to draw up a horizontal report dealing with the problems that are common to most of the agencies.
I am pleased to be able to say that the majority of the agencies have received clear statements of assurance from the Court of Auditors. They have therefore been properly managed. At the same time, many of them – almost all of them, in fact – still have major surplus problems and problems complying with the Financial Regulation and the Staff Regulations year after year. This is something we need to think about, namely the fact that we repeat the same criticism of certain points year after year and yet nothing ever changes. This means that we must think more about how we enforce responsibility on the part of these agencies and how we actually govern them. In the horizontal report, I therefore propose, among other things, that we make fixed reductions when the agencies do not use a sufficient proportion of a budget or when they are unable to fill all positions. It is also proposed that we should have a common support service to help the small agencies with burdensome administrative tasks. I believe this to be extremely important.
This year, we chose to look specifically at four agencies which received poor statements of assurance from the Court of Auditors and which have particularly major issues. These were the European Police College, the European GNSS Supervisory Authority – GNSS being what we usually refer to as Galileo – the European Railway Agency and Frontex. I am pleased to be able to state that it has been possible to grant discharge to three of these, Galileo, the European Railway Agency and Frontex, after examining all of the information they provided us with.
Unfortunately, Cepol, that is, the European Police Academy, has submitted a lot of information, but nowhere near all of it. Therefore we are not yet able to grant it discharge. The remaining problem is the issue of the private use of EU taxpayers’ money, such as private use to pay for furniture, private mobile telephone calls and private travel. We have requested information on this, but have not received all of it. The committee and I therefore propose that we postpone the granting of discharge until Cepol has provided a full declaration in this regard. There is, of course, also an ongoing fraud investigation in Olaf regarding this agency. This is serious and we need to demonstrate that we take it seriously and we must get to the bottom of it. This is why we are postponing the granting of discharge. This is not something I do gladly, but I would maintain that it is the only responsible thing to do. We need to have all the information on the table before we can grant discharge."@en1
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