EU Financial Management

Important as this debate is, it also demonstrates the cultural inadequacy of the way in which the European Union conducts itself. On the issue of how taxpayers’ money is spent, we can look back with some pride on the fact that the Public Accounts Committee was set up under Gladstone. Nor does anyone have any serious doubt that the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee do a thorough job in identifying inadequacies and, where necessary, maladministration or fraud in the UK. However, the report by the Court of Auditors on OLAF makes the following comments:"““The Office’s investigations policy is still uncertain . . . With regard to preliminary work . . . analyses are still rudimentary . . . Supervision of investigations by the Office’s management has generally proved inadequate . . . The duration of investigations has not been brought under control . . . There is no system in place to measure investigators’ actual workload or the time they spend on investigations . . . The obligation to report investigations that are more than nine months old to the Supervisory Committee has had no notable effect . . . It is still difficult to determine the actual results of investigations. In the area of internal investigations, little progress has been achieved since 1988 with regard to sanctions imposed.””" As I mentioned in an earlier intervention, the report also stated:"““There is no independent control of the legality of investigative actions.””" That is an average catalogue of condemnation of the so-called efficiency of a body that was, as the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said, set up some seven years ago. That is what the Court of Auditors is still saying about it. The importance of that criticism is that OLAF is at the hard end of the so-called investigations of malfeasance in respect of taxpayers’ money. We have heard reference before to the question of irregularities, and I gave some figures earlier, which I shall briefly rehearse again. In 2004, for the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund there were irregularities of €82,064,000. On the structural measures, irregularities for that year totalled €531,744,438. The sum to be recovered was €357 million. The amount declared irrecoverable, pending a formal decision, was €15 million. Those are facts, and I take them from the official documents.