The European Court of Auditors (ECA) published its oversight report on the implementation of the EU 2011 budget. The Court has signed off the 2011 accounts as complete and accurate, but finds too many errors in the underlying payments.The ECA estimates a rate of error of 3,9% for the EU budget as a whole. The rate of error was particularly high in 2 areas: Rural development (7,7%) and Regional policy(6%). Errors are caused by non-compliance of beneficiaries with EU- and national rules governing spending. Only a small part of errors represent fraud. Given that 80% of the EU budget is managed by the Member States, the ECA report notes that Member States are not doing their job as they fully should. In over 60% of the audited regional policy transactions affected by error, sufficient information was available to the MS authorities to have detected and corrected at least some of the errors before claiming reimbursement from the Commission.
Full report and press release available here: