Next week (18-19 March), the European Parliament’s budgetary-control committee is scheduled to approve reports on the spending in 2011 of the European Union’s institutions and bodies. The reports will be voted on by the Parliament’s plenary in April.
The annual discharge procedure is the main moment of public accountability for the EU’s institutions. Nominally, the Parliament acts on the recommendation of the Council of Ministers. But in practice, the Parliament’s procedure is far more rigorous.
As part of the discharge, MEPs on the budgetary-control committee get an opportunity to ask questions and make comments about the past spending of each institution or body. The Parliament as a whole has the power to approve each body’s spending, to reject it, or to postpone approval until MEPs are satisfied with the response.
The European Court of Auditors audits the annual accounts of each body of the EU, providing MEPs with information and analysis to draft their own reports. The secretaries-general of the EU institutions – the officials responsible for financial management – appear at public hearings before the committee, and in the case of the European Commission, individual commissioners are called to provide testimony about particular policy areas. In the current cycle, the committee held hearings between November and January with various officials or appointees including eight European commissioners and Catherine Day, the Commission’s secretary-general; Vítor Caldeira, the president of the European Court of Auditors; and Klaus Welle, the secretary-general of the Parliament.
Following the hearings, the committee held a two-day discussion of the draft reports last month (18-19 February), and MEPs then had the opportunity to propose changes to the draft reports before the votes in committee.
European Commission
Last month, member states’ finance ministers recommended that the European Commission should be “granted discharge” for its 2011 spending, although the ministers noted that “a significant number of transactions in important policy areas such as agriculture, cohesion policy and research remain affected” by error rates. For the second year in a row, the error rate estimated by the European Court of Auditors for EU spending rose, to 3.9%. The Commission points out that most of the errors happen in areas with ‘shared management’, where programmes are implemented by the member states. The Court noted that national authorities had sufficient information to take action in two-thirds of the transactions affected by errors in regional spending, for example.
MEPs are expected to make a number of specific recommendations in areas where the Commission has full control, for example to improve the quality and comparability of the annual activity reports drafted by the Commission’s departments.
Council of Ministers
Almost by tradition, the MEPs complain that they should have greater freedom to scrutinise the Council’s books. This year, MEPs have struck a somewhat more conciliatory tone on spending by the European Council and the Council of Ministers. The Parliament “regrets that not all the Union institutions respect the same standards in relation to transparency” and “believes that the Council could make improvements in that regard”. Last year, by contrast, it had noted “that the Council ought to be transparent and fully accountable to the European citizens for the funds entrusted to it as a Union institution” and that it “must participate fully and in good faith in the annual discharge process”.
However, several amendments are seeking to sharpen the language, and MEPs are expected to reject the Council’s accounts again, as they have done for years as part of their long-running battle over the interpretation of a 1970s ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ in which the two institutions in effect agreed not to scrutinise each other’s administrative spending.
Agencies
A more momentous change is taking place with the Parliament’s scrutiny of the more than 30 decentralised agencies of the EU. Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, a Dutch Liberal who has written the Parliament’s discharge reports for the EU’s agencies, believes that last year’s discharge was handled badly and that the relationship between the Parliament and agencies requires mending.
“Parliament is not a public prosecutor,” Gerbrandy said. “I believe that last year’s rapporteur got totally out of control; this was more of a personal hunt than a responsible discharge.”
Monica Macovei, the centre-right Romanian MEP who drafted last year’s discharge reports on the agencies, is a former anti-corruption prosecutor and justice minister of Romania. Macovei focused her criticism on the European Medicine Agency, the European Food Safety Agency and especially the European Environment Agency, whose discharge she blocked for months and whose executive director, Jacqueline McGlade, failed to win re-appointment last December. But Gerbrandy conceded that her combative style had wrought changes: “The agencies are this year much more serious about the discharge.” Still, he said, “we could have got that result without all the quarrelling”.
EEAS
Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, received a flood of written questions on the staffing and management of the European External Action Service, which was launched two years ago. But the draft report acknowledges the difficulties created by the service’s launch and notes that they are unlikely to be repeated in coming years. The report urges Ashton to reduce what it calls the service’s “top-heavy administration”, in which some directorates have between 20 and 30 staff members.
Rapporteurs
On the European Parliament: Eva Ortiz, (European People’s Party group, Spain);
On the European Commission: Jens Geier (Socialists and Democrats group, Germany);
On the European Council and the Council of Ministers: AndreaCCešková (European Conservatives and Reformists group, Czech Republic);
On EU agencies: Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats group, the Netherlands);
On the EEAS: Ryszard Czarnecki (European Conservatives and Reformists group, Poland).