The EU auditors do it again

The report in The Times suggests that the Commission has improved the control of its own immediate spending but that big discrepancies are still turning up in EU countries.

Half the cattle that Slovene farmers said they owned, so qualifying them for special EU cow and beef grants, did not exist, the paper reports. A quarter of their sheep and goats were equally invisible. Nine payments worth €2 billion to olive oil producers in Spain, Greece and Italy last year were either inflated or wrong.

The auditors discovered that two thirds of the 95 EUfinanced regional projects that they examined, which include new roads and bridges, contained “material errors”. These ranged from a lack of proper invoices for expenditure being reclaimed to declaring costs that had no relation to the scheme being funded. There are also considerable variations in the way that national authorities apply EU rules.

Last year Poland simply gave a warning to anyone who did not apply good farming practices. Under EU law, they should have been fined almost €1 million. In Greece, farmers’ unions input agricultural data into insecure computer systems that can be modified externally at any time.

What's the lesson? Standards differ across the EU and these sprawling expenditures are too huge to be monitored properly, especially since we know that OLAF is ineffectual at best.

Nor is it easy to see any plausible reforms which could deal with this expensive problem. The institution is just too big.