More fun in Europe...

[Guest]

Well, fun for those that get the back-handers and the organisations that get the lucrative contracts, anyway.

Because for the 18th year in row, auditors have refused to sign off the EU accounts. Now, this isn't just because they have found a few anomalies here, or a few dodgy invoices there. It seems that they are unhappy with quite a large amount of spending.

"How much are they concerned about?" you may ask.

Well, it's not 89 thousand Euros. Not 8.9 million Euros. Not even 89 million Euros.

It's 89 BILLION Euros!

And these crooks have the nerve to ask taxpayers for another big increase in the budget this year!

That anyone with half a brain still believes that the EU has any credibility whatsoever beats me. Just layers of apparatchiks, lawyers and bureaucrats shuffling money about and getting rich at our expense.

[teamsaint]

link please?

89 bn over how many years please Simes?

[french frank]

"How much are they concerned about?" you may ask.

Well, it's not 89 thousand Euros. Not 8.9 million Euros. Not even 89 million Euros.

It's 89 BILLION Euros!

The Irish Independent says 5.2bn euros:

"The European Court of Auditors, which is responsible for checking the finances of the EU's institutions, said on Tuesday it had found irregularities affecting 4pc of total spending during 2011, equivalent to around €5.2bn."

??

This has a quote from the auditors.

[mercia]

£89 billion ?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/9657673/Audit-seriously-undermines-credibility-of-EU-spending.html

[Simon]

"The commission dismissed the ECA's finding of "serious failure to respect public procurement" with the allocation of contracts, funded by the EU to the tune of £13 million, for building a Romania-Hungary gas pipeline.

"We interpret the rules differently," said a spokesman."

Of all the arrogant j&rks. You bet they do! And we can do absolutely nothing about it.

[french frank]

to the tune of £13 million, for building a Romania-Hungary gas pipeline.

We're still a bit short of €89 bn.

[Simon]

We're still a bit short of €89 bn.

The £13 million was just the pipeline bit of the fraud, which led to that particular quote.

[Serial_Apologist]

We're still a bit short of €89 bn.

That would be the connection charges!

[teamsaint]

That would be the connection charges!

Good thing they didn't switch to another supplier in the first 12 months ....

[Serial_Apologist]

Good thing they didn't switch to another supplier in the first 12 months ....

[french frank]

The £13 million was just the pipeline bit of the fraud, which led to that particular quote.

Well, as mercia pointed out, The Telegraph quotes £89bn not €89bn. But isn't that the size of the budget which is 'affected by material error', not the size of the error - which is elsewhere given as 3.9% - or just over €5bn. The total amount 'affected' is a great deal because the EU is a huge organisation with a huge budget. Even the Express* can only come up with some footling examples - all of which relate to individuals and organisations outside the EU administration, not the administration itself.

The ECA chairman said: "With Europe's public finances under severe pressure, there remains scope to spend EU money more efficiently and in a better targeted manner..."


*"HOW THEY WASTED OUR TAX

• More than £160,000 was paid to a scheme in Lombardy, Italy, to build a farm with a lab for processing and a terrace for drying fruit. It was found to be a private dwelling.
• An aid agency paid £4million to itself for “technical assistance”.
• A farmer was granted a special premium for 150 sheep. Auditors found he had no sheep.
• In Italy and Spain, farmers were paid for keeping “permanent pasture” that turned out to be dense forests.
• A farmer paid to carry out appropriate orchard management techniques failed to even prune his trees."

Ed: This in interesting:

"Improperly accounted for expenditure, which includes fraud, is higher in the UK’s national accounts, although that point is rarely made clear in UK press coverage of the EU’s accounts. It is also true that the EU sets higher standards for its accounts than those required by Parliament in the UK. "

[french frank]

Well, as mercia pointed out, The Telegraph quotes £89bn not €89bn. But isn't that the size of the budget which is 'affected by material error', not the size of the error - which is elsewhere given as 3.9% - or just over €5bn.

Yes, that seems to be the case:

"The major difficulty is that since 1994 the Court of Auditors is required to approve the accounts as a whole or qualify them as a whole. This single verdict is often misunderstood as meaning that all EU expenditure is subject to fraud or error. What concerns the Court is the error rate in payments – it estimated this rate to be 3.7 per cent in 2010. But this is an error rate; the Court is not saying that 3.7 per cent of payments were in some way fraudulent, most of the errors will have been the result of mistakes. "

[Simon]

Yes, that seems to be the case:

"The major difficulty is that since 1994 the Court of Auditors is required to approve the accounts as a whole or qualify them as a whole. This single verdict is often misunderstood as meaning that all EU expenditure is subject to fraud or error. What concerns the Court is the error rate in payments – it estimated this rate to be 3.7 per cent in 2010. But this is an error rate; the Court is not saying that 3.7 per cent of payments were in some way fraudulent, most of the errors will have been the result of mistakes. "

Misunderstood? I hardly think anyone would believe that all the payments are fraudulent: even I accept that the EU has to get some of its deals right, if only by accident...

But if you're happy with just 5 billion being fraudulent or "in error", that's fine. I wonder what the definition of an EU "error" might be. I'm sure it can be stretched to include an imaginatively large range of "mistakes".

And the reason I'm so sure about this is because I've actually come across some of them in real life!

[Flosshilde]

Simon has such a rich & varied experience of so many things, & so many friends, that I sometimes think he must be a committee.

[Bryn]

Simon has such a rich & varied experience of so many things, & so many friends, that I sometimes think he must be a committee.

Or perhaps a cabal?