WIREDGOV

The European Commission managed its 2014 EU budget funds according to the rules, so Parliament granted it a “discharge” approval for that year, in a resolution voted on Thursday. Parliament’s own management of EU funds in 2014 was also approved. However, Parliament postponed approving spending by three joint private sector-EU partnerships in technology field, the Council of Ministers and the European Council.

EU budget must focus on results

MEPs say that the EU budget should be result-oriented, i.e. focus on whether the programmes and projects that it funds achieve their aims.The resolution underlines that EU funding must efficiently advance EU goals, projects should be aligned with EU policies and better synergies should be achieved among all available resources in the fields like neighborhood policy, external aid or tackling youth unemployment. The budget also needs to be flexible enough to deal with unforeseen events, such as migration surges, they add.

Spending errors up

The EU Commission is legally responsible for the biggest chunk of the funds, amounting to €142.5 billion in 2014, but 80% of all EU funding is in fact managed locally, by EU member states.

MEPs are concerned that the error rate for spending under shared management by the EU Commission and member states in 2014 amounts to 4.6%, which is well above the 2% threshold beneath which the European Court of Auditors could classify payments as error-free. They also point out that errors in spending directly managed by the Commission soared in 2014 and for the first time matched the error rate for spending under shared management.

MEPs urge the Commission to check up more often on areas and recipients with high risk of errors, focus onex-ante controls, and collaborate with the member states to correct errors before declaring expenditure.

The Commission should be entirely responsible for recovering unduly paid funds and returning them to the EU budget. To enable it to do so, it should establish uniform principles of member state reporting, says the resolution.

Discharge postponed

For the sixth consecutive year, the Budgetary Control Committee had recommended that Parliament postpone granting discharge to the Council of Ministers and the European Council (heads of state or government) due to their failure to cooperate with Parliament by supplying the figures it needs to make an assessment of spending.

Parliament postponed approving spending by three joint private sector-EU technology partnerships -ARTEMIS, ENIAC, and Fusion for Energy (F4E), the EU agency contributing to the ITER international fusion reactor project - because they have yet to provide additional documents and information.

Next steps

Parliament will take its final decision on the postponed discharges in October.