Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-11-26-Speech-4-009"
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"en.20091126.3.4-009"2
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"Mr President, the Commission welcomes the Court’s annual report for 2008. I have already had the opportunity to thank the Court for the very good cooperation enjoyed again this year. We have had a very fruitful dialogue and the report is very constructive.
The Court further recommends that the Commission should continue to strive to gain assurance from the annual summaries of all Member States, as well as from voluntary initiatives by certain Member States, in the form of national declarations, or by supreme audit institutions.
The Commission agrees that we obviously need to be able to count on quality inputs from Member States. We see improvements, but we are also considering strengthening the legal base to accelerate the process.
Finally, the Court emphasises the importance of clear objectives, transparent and easy-to-understand rules, and effective supervision. This reduces the risk of error and the costs of control. However, it is not something that can be achieved from one day to the next and, of course, the upcoming reviews of the budget, the financial framework and the financial regulation present opportunities not to be missed.
What we need to do now is to improve assurances obtained from Member States for structural funds, striving for more simplification, which increasingly will require changes to the legislation governing the various programmes. The revision of the Financial Regulation is currently under consultation, and the Commission will make proposals in spring 2010. We also need to define together an acceptable ratio between costs and risk – the so-called ‘tolerable risk of error’.
The European Parliament has, in the past, strongly supported the Commission’s efforts to achieve a positive statement of assurance. Now that our efforts are becoming measurable, I hope I can count on its continuing backing to move forward.
The 2008 discharge procedure starts in the last days of this Commission and is expected to conclude in the early months of the next Commission. Even though it concerns last year’s budget, let us make it a forward-looking procedure.
As you have just heard President Caldeira state, the level of irregularity has decreased overall in recent years. Things really started to improve five years ago, and, since 2004, the ‘red area’, where the Court finds the most errors and for which it gives a ‘red card’, has been reduced by half.
For 2008, the report shows a completely clean opinion on the accounts for the second year in a row, as a result of the major achievement of the thorough reform and transition to accrual accounting.
Secondly, for the first time, agriculture, taken as a whole, has now become ‘clean and green’. This can certainly be attributed to the substantial simplification efforts of recent years. Thirdly, the policy group entitled ‘education and citizenship’ has also become green.
For research in general, things are improving and the Court points out that irregularities are essentially linked to the Sixth Framework Programme, which allows hope that the improved and simplified Seventh Framework Programme rules will bring a better result.
Again, as last year, the Court has found no red light for the management and control systems. Moreover, all annual activity reports by Commission services are deemed by the Court to give reasonable assurance, with or without qualifications, that internal control systems ensure the legality and regularity of the underlying transactions. This said, the report also clearly charts the work that still needs to be done.
The ‘red area’ is now about 30%, corresponding to cohesion spending, which is the one area where the Court has still not found significant progress in the level of irregularities. This was perhaps to be expected, given that in 2008, the Court did not audit payments made under the improved systems set up for the new 2007-2013 programming period. In this regard, the Commission notes that the Court’s findings on cohesion largely coincide with our own general assessment.
For the structural funds, the Commission had reservations in 2008 because of deficiencies in the control systems for Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, the United Kingdom, France, Poland and Luxembourg. The Commission is not shy regarding transparency as to where the systemic problems lie. The names of these Member States were published back in June in the Commission’s synthesis report.
The Court also reminds us of the essential role of complete and reliable information from all Member States on financial corrections. We need this to prove that multiannual control systems work and to mitigate the effects of the errors detected."@en1
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