Auditors reject EU accounts
Auditors have refused to sign-off the European Union’s annual accounts for the 11th consecutive year.
Hubert Weber, president of the European court of auditors, offered a damning indictment of accounting practices earlier today, telling MEPs that “the vast majority of the payments budget was again materially affected by errors of legality and regularity”.
Announcing the findings to the European parliament, the auditors blamed individual governments for the bulk of the irregularities, accusing many of failing to disclose the full state of their spending.
They also raised serious concerns about the lack of accuracy in EU accounts, notably with regard to spending on research and agriculture.
“We need to look at why mistakes happen in the first place and do something about it,” Mr Weber said.
However, auditors conceded that the EU had made “some progress”, singling out the new integrated administration and control system (IACS) for praise, suggesting that it had reduced errors in the calculation of agricultural expenditure – which accounts for almost half of total EU spending.
European funding is an extremely contentious issue, not least in the UK and France, where major reservations exist regarding rebates and funding among broad swathes of the population.
The Conservatives have been particularly critical about the porous nature of EU accounting in the past, and Tory MEP Chris Heaton-Harris today called on the British government to use its presidency of the EU to make the system more transparent.
“It is astounding that the British government refuses even to question the [European] commission about these accounts,” he said.
“Worse than that, it has now put the British budget rebate on the table and so is looking to tip billions more of UK taxpayers’ money into the leaky bucket that is the EU accounts.”
Last year, the EU budget totalled ?100 billion (£67 billion), of which ?44 billion (£29.6 billion) was related to agricultural spending.
