EU auditors warn of the risk of duplication of EU funding, in which different amounts could be allocated to the same objectives. In their latest report, they warn that the large quantities of The recovery plan may overlap with funding from the community budget. They also believe that the control mechanisms put in place by Brussels are insufficient to avoid the risk of double financing.
The report made public by the EU Court of Auditors this Monday puts, for example, the 358 billion euros allocated in the budget until 2027 to cohesion policy and the 34 billion euros to the Connecting Europe mechanism. Such elements could duplicate the 648 billion euros from the Recovery Plan, which are also intended for similar actions in sectors such as energy infrastructure or transport.
The member of the Court of Auditors and responsible for the report, Annemie Turtelboom, stressed that the double financing “constitutes a misappropriation of public funds from the EU and a waste of European taxpayers’ money. But, despite this, the guarantees which we have “they are very insufficient”.
The report considers that the European legal framework does not include an adequate definition of what constitutes double financing in relation to the recovery plan, which observes that the stages and objectives are achieved and not so much the cost of such initiatives. Furthermore, they believe that different levels of governance make coordination and supervision difficult.
Thus, “the control of the absence of double financing depends largely on the self-declarations of the beneficiaries of EU money”, notes the Court of Auditors. The controls carried out are mainly manual and the IT tools are not interoperable “it is difficult to detect double financing.”
In practice, the auditors point out, countries tend to avoid combining financing from the recovery plan and that from European funds. The pandemic exit plan, they warn, presents a blind spot which leads to a reliability gap since the payment is linked to the achievement of milestones and targets and the Commission does not have access to details of its use in practice. In fact, you don’t even have access to the full list of the largest recipients of Next Generation funds.
Although the report acknowledges that the community executive has identified two potential cases of duplication of Community funding in two Member States, They also believe that the fact that there are only two cases “shows the random nature of the detection system” and that the tools “are neither adequate nor effective”.
