The bottom line

[Sunite]

The bottom line

    * Mark Mardell
    * 8 Nov 07, 01:44 AM

On a recent Radio 5 live phone-in programme, supposedly on the Lisbon Treaty, I was struck by how many callers' main reason for disliking the EU was "waste of money" and "corruption".

Many of them cited the fact that every year the EU’s finances don’t get the thumbs up from the accountants.

cows203afp.jpgAnd it's that time of year again - next Tuesday, for the 13th year running, the Court of Auditors will refuse to clear the accounts because of irregularities.

The European Commission knows how damaging this is and argues that:

      • Most of the spending is done by national governments, and so it's their fault for not keeping proper accounts

      • The accounting procedure is very tight, and under these rules many big institutions would not pass - the former head of the National Audit Office, Sir John Bourn, suggested that if he was operating under similar rules, the UK’s accounts might have failed

      • Most of the errors are technical rather than fraudulent, and could be due to paperwork that’s lost five years after the end of a project, or academics carrying out EU-funded research failing to fill in proper hour-by-hour time-sheets

I don’t think the auditors buy all of this.

They don’t distinguish between money being mis-spent due to bad paperwork and cash going missing because of deliberate criminal intent. I think this year they will find that the situation is getting better on agricultural payments but that there are still real problems with roads and bridges and the like.

Also, the commission does spend at least 20% of the budget and some of this spending is regularly criticised.

The improvement in the Common Agricultural Policy payments is largely because money now goes directly to farmers for the size of fields they own, and this is easier to double check using satellite pictures than the number of cows they own.

But there’s no doubt that between 70 and 80% of the EU’s spending does go through the national governments. There’s talk about countries coming up with their own audited statement saying that all the money has been spent properly. But only Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark have shown the remotest interest.

I want to check some of these claims out for myself and see where things go wrong. But it’s a nightmare pinning down real examples.

This may be part of the story itself. The Court of Auditors doesn’t make public the irregularities it finds: the auditors feel their job is to audit, not to name and shame. The commission deals directly with the nation states, and can't give examples either. The nation states?

Well that’s what we are trying at the moment... If you run a small country and don’t keep your books properly, have built a bridge and creamed off the cash, or you lost the accounts for some fields five years ago, do drop me a line... I promise to be very indiscreet.