Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-04-Speech-4-017"
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"en.20031204.1.4-017"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, after the speech by my friend Mr Van Hulten, I am no longer certain whether we are talking about the Court of Auditors’ report or the report of the Bureau meeting. If we are talking about the Court of Auditors’ report, there is no problem, because that was the debate for which I put my name down.
First of all, I should like to praise the work of the President of the Court of Auditors, Mr Fabra Vallés, and the work of the Court as a whole. I believe that, once again, the Court of Auditors has given us a document that deserves and requires our full attention. Unfortunately, I do not believe that this document will be widely read outside our institution, for example by national governments, by people in the Council and in the Ecofin Council, who think that it is quite all right to take power away from the European Parliament, whereas they ought first of all to look at and check their own accounts and take seriously the point raised by the Court of Auditors.
Mr Van Hulten was right when he said that the Court of Auditors has drawn attention to a certain number of things that this House also needs to put in order. It is unfortunate that we sometimes tend to contemplate our own navels too much. We can see straight away those things in Parliament that are not working properly, and it is quite right that we should, and yet, for years, the Court of Auditors has been telling us that 80% of our expenditure, which is controlled by the Member States, contains an improbable number of errors, false allocations and problems which the Court itself has not been able to identify specifically.
So I ask myself when we are going to clear things up and finally put this system in order. It is our duty to be fastidious, and to pay attention to what the Commission and the other institutions do. As you know, Mrs Schreyer and Mr Fabra Vallés, we in the Committee on Budgetary Control have submitted two hundred questions to the Commission – perhaps even more – based on the Court of Auditors’ report. Unfortunately, though, we did not put any to the Member States, because we are not able to do so. I believe that this is a real problem. We must find a way of coming up with a solution, and of making the Court of Auditors’ report binding not only on the Commission, which will be asked to produce accounts, but also with regard to the accounts of Member States.
The other problem is how to follow up the recommendations that the Court of Auditors has made. For years now, the Court of Auditors has not carried out specific audits or surveys, for example of Eurostat. Yet for years it has been highlighting a certain number of problems that have never been taken seriously. For example, on the issue of export refunds, the Court of Auditors had for years identified a problem which had never been taken seriously, and the result of that was that we ended up with the scandal of which we are only too well aware.
If this exercise is not to be a pointless one, I believe that it must be given a more specific content, at any rate as regards the following two points: the way in which follow-up measures are organised at Member State level, and the reason why the Commission, and we ourselves, do not take sufficient account of the report’s conclusions."@en1
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