euobserver.com/economic/143877
It just gets worse!
Over €6bn of EU taxpayers' money was stolen by criminals in recent years and over €130m is still being lost each year, EU auditors have warned.
They stole another €391m in 2017, according to Olaf, the EU's principal anti-fraud agency, with the vast majority of theft in the areas of EU aid to poor regions and fisheries.
But the actual figures are likely to be much higher because "the scale of fraud is underreported", Thursday's report said.
More than 540 cases should have gone to court between 2009 and 2016, Olaf had said.
But to date, member states have indicted just 137 suspects and dismissed 171 cases, mostly due to "insufficient evidence".
Part of the problem is that member states do not report all dodgy cases to Olaf.
Under the rules, they do not even have to monitor EU payments worth less than €10,000, even though many EU grants to farmers fall below that threshold.
Whoever is to blame, the current set up leaves EU officials in the dark when they sign cheques for farmers in, say, Slovakia, or for new bridges in, say, Kosovo.
"Currently, fraud risks are assessed at DG level," Thursday's report said, referring to directors-generals (DGs) - the 37 men and women who run the EU commission's various departments.
"No central fraud risk assessment is carried out for the commission as a whole ... they [the DGs] do not use other information coming from external sources, such as national crime statistics or official government reports, or analyses and reports by NGOs," the EU auditors said.
DGs and member states can bar known fraudsters from EU contracts in an EU database called EDES, the auditors noted.
The EU needed "a robust fraud reporting system, providing information on the scale, nature and root causes to fraud", the financial watchdog said.
The Commission and the Member States have a shared responsibility to protect the EU’s financial interests against fraud and corruption.
However, we found that the Commission lacks comprehensive information on the scale, nature and causes of fraud. Its official statistics on detected fraud are not complete and it has so far not carried out any assessment of undetected fraud. Some information is available on fraud patterns and schemes used in different sectors. There is no detailed analysis to identify what causes some recipients of EU money to behave fraudulently. This lack of information reduces the practical value of the Commission’s strategic plans, such as the CAFS, which has not been updated since 2011.
rticle 325 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) provides a legal basis for protecting the EU's financial interests against fraud, corruption and other illegal activities (Annex I).
05
The European Commission must take the necessary measures to provide reasonable assurance that irregularities (including fraud) in the use of the EU budget are prevented, detected and corrected5. It shares this responsibility with Member States in the domain of shared management, e.g. in the Cohesion and Agriculture spending areas.
06
The ‘Directive on the fight against fraud to the Union's financial interests by means of criminal law’ (the ‘PIF Directive’)6 provides for harmonised definition of offences affecting the EU’s financial interests as well as penalties and statute of limitations for such cases. This Directive was adopted on 5 July 2017. Member States have to implement it into national law by July 20197.
During our audit, we identified one Member State where irregularities reported within IMS for the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund and European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development accounted for only a small share (7 %) of all irregularities detected by the Member State for these two Funds. On the other hand, from the 7 % of reported irregularities, the Member State qualified a high share (60 %) as suspected fraud.
The Commission does not carry out comprehensive checks on the quality of data reported in the IMS; nor does it ask Member State authorities to provide assurance as to the reliability of the data reported. Partial checks on compliance with reporting obligations are performed within the framework of system audits.
31
Neither OLAF nor any other body within the Commission gathers information on criminal cases linked to EU financial interests investigated by national authorities. Member States have their own systems for recording cases under investigation, and nearly half of them do not differentiate between financial crimes affecting national interests and those affecting EU interests. As a result, neither the Commission nor such Member States have data on fraud in EU spending as a separate category.
^^ its one huge awful mess, how anyone can want to be a part of this really is utterly beyond me!