Discharges 2016: call for faster and better spending

The European Parliament welcomes the decrease of errors in payments from the EU budget. The Report on the annual approval process of how EU taxpayers’ money is spent was adopted in plenary today. In his Discharge Report, EPP Group MEP Joachim Zeller highlights this positive trend, but recalls that especially in shared management with Member States, the error rate still lies above the acceptable threshold of 2%.

"Errors do not always mean that money has been lost or wasted, but even if rules are complied with, we have to ensure that money is being spent according to the defined objectives and that those are actually achieved”, said Zeller. He also underlined that the European Commission needs to align policy objectives, financial cycles, the legislative period of the Parliament and the Commission’s mandate.

In his Report, Zeller asks the Commission to fundamentally review the young farmers’ and greening schemes. “The aim of encouraging more young people to take up farming and to strive for more sustainable farming practices could not be achieved”. The Report insists on more transparency for the financing of external policies. “We have to bring the fragmented financing of migration policy under a single and transparent roof. Also, the increasing number of trust funds needs a more transparent and comprehensible regime”, added Zeller.

He reiterated the need to speed up the payments for cohesion policy programmes. “The structural funds are the key pillar for investment in many regions in Europe. We find ourselves in the third year of the new financing period but implementation and absorption of the funding still lag behind. A vast number of rural areas, local communities and SMEs have suffered because of these delays”, he said. The Rapporteur appeals to the Commission and Member States to ensure a faster implementation of the EU’s investment policies in the future especially with regard to the next Multiannual Financial Framework.

“EU joint undertakings are valuable public-private partnership bodies to conduct research and innovations in many fields such as biotechnology, medicine or energy technology. They also offer lots of opportunities for many innovative small and medium-sized companies”, said Brian Hayes MEP, the Parliament’s Rapporteur on the 2016 discharge of the joint undertakings.

“The evaluation of the 2016 governance and the use of EU funds shows that these undertakings have achieved results and progress which show that they do leverage, at their best, excellent value for taxpayers’ money."