European Union|According to Petri Sarvamaa, an arrangement similar to the EU’s recovery tool should not be repeated.
European a recent member of the Court of Auditors Petri Sarvamaa (kok) says that the EU’s recovery instrument made due to the corona pandemic has been a “bad failure” in terms of monitoring the use of money.
Sarvamaa considers the recovery package as a precedent that must be learned from structural mistakes. A similar arrangement must not be made a second time, he says.
“It’s a problem child because we can’t show how the money was spent and we can’t trace it to the final beneficiary. We are very concerned about this.”
The year 2023 was the third year of operation of the over 700 billion euro recovery and recovery support instrument. It is intended to support, among other things, the green transition and digitalization and smooth out the effects of the corona crisis.
EU countries receive funding from the support instrument in exchange for the fact that they have achieved pre-set goals or intermediate goals.
The EU auditors found payments of the recovery tool for last year, for which not all conditions were met. There were also deficiencies in the control systems of the member states.
The recovery money is still largely unused. The fund is supposed to operate until August 2026.
Sarvamaa was appointed in November last year as a member of the Court of Auditors, which oversees the use of EU funds. He started in the position in June. Sarvamaa previously served as an EU parliamentarian.
The Court of Auditors published its annual report on Wednesday, which, as in previous years, highlights errors on the expenditure side of the budget.
There were errors especially in cohesion apples, which take up almost 40 percent of the EU budget. The EU pays cohesion money to reduce economic and social differences between member states, meaning this support goes to the poorest member states and regions.
According to the findings of the auditors, there were errors in more than nine percent of the cohesion payments.
Mistakes According to Sarvamaa, they do not mean that cohesion money has been wasted or in the pockets of fraudsters, but that EU rules have not been followed in all their payments.
Some of the errors are due to the complexity of the system.
“Our big concern is that the authorities of the member states are actually no longer able to cope with this complex jungle of rules related to the EU budget and budgeting,” says Sarvamaa.
The auditors give a negative opinion on the EU’s spending for 2023 due to, among other things, errors in the cohesion payments and others. The EU Parliament decides on the Commission’s discharge from liability.
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