One of the many misleading stories about the EU is that they haven't had their accounts signed off for years. I had a conversation the other day with a man in a pub who responded with this as a catch-all answer to any idea that the EU are not entirely guilty of every charge ever levelled at them. I knew it wasn't true but I decided to look into it in a bit more detail.
The European Court of Auditors produce an audit every year. The latest one covering 2016 is (HERE). Note on page 04 they say this:
"The 2016 accounts were prepared in accordance with international standards and present, in all material aspects, a true and fair view. Therefore, as has been the case every year since 2007, we give a clean opinion on their reliability".
To make matters even clearer, they repeat on page 08:
"We were therefore able to give a clean opinion of the reliability of (i.e. "sign off") the accounts as we have done every year since 2007)"
However, this is not to say the accounts are error free, they aren't, as the auditors make clear. They find errors in the payments and say, "For expenditure, we estimate the level of error in expenditure as a whole at 3.1 % (see Diagram 2). This compares to 3.8 % in 2015 and 4.4 % in 2014".
But as they make clear on page 14 it is NOT fraud:
"Fraud is an act of deliberate deception to gain a benefit. Our estimate of the level of error in the EU budget is therefore neither a measure of fraud nor of inefficiency or waste. It is an estimate of the money that should not have been paid out because it was not used in accordance with the applicable rules and regulations".
But most of these errors are at national level, not EU level - some say up to 90% of the errors are in country rather than Brussels. And the UK is not entirely innocent. In 2014 the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee issued a damming report (HERE) which contained on page 3:
"Over the last decade, the UK Government has incurred at least £650 million in penalties to the European Commission (the Commission) because of errors in how UK public bodies have spent European Union (EU) funds. EU rules and regulations for spending EU funds are complex, and this in itself contributes to errors; however, UK governments have chosen to design programmes which have added to this complexity, driving up the risk of errors and penalties further. UK government departments have exhibited a distinct lack of urgency in tackling complexity and reducing the levels of penalties incurred".
So, whenever people tell you the EU's accounts have not been signed off you will have a ready defence. They have. And where there are errors, it isn't them, it's US!
