The Brussels accounts scandal must be stopped

Here we go again. Today, for the 14th year in a row, the European Court of Auditors will unveil their report, telling us that they refuse to clear the EU accounts. What's worse, no one will really seem to care. We are told that the accounts won't be cleared until 2020 - if then.

Having worked inside the Brussels nomenklatura and having being sacked for my insistence that financial controls have to be strengthened, I am not surprised to find that nothing has changed other than the arguments deployed to defend this state of affairs. What the auditors have been saying for years is that most of the payments made by the Commission from its £70 billion-a- year budget cannot be deemed legal or regular. That is, that they cannot confirm those payments have been made to the correct person for the correct purpose and for the correct amount. It stretches credulity to insist, as the Europhiles do, that this does not mean that there is fraud.

Because the payments are made to beneficiaries in the member countries it's easy enough for the institutions to put the blame on those recipients. Which is what they do, claiming that the problem is one of insufficient attention being paid to the paperwork. But who designed the paperwork that no one understands or completes? And who doesn't insist on it being completed? The institutions themselves, of course. Because this control is missing there is no way to protect against fraud or even to uncover it.

We might not expect the European Union to be whiter than white, but we should at least hold them to the standard of being competent. Who is to blame for this situation? The Members of the European Parliament. For those 14 years they've been allowing this situation to continue.

It's not just that too many have gone native, dreaming of their part in constructing that shimmering vision of “Europe”. It's that they've forgotten what a Parliament is for, which is not simply to pass legislation, but to hold those who implement it to account. Only a complete cynic would note that those who do complain, those who do insist that this situation must change, start to find their own activities, their own expense accounts, say, subjected to audits of much greater detailed scrutiny than are applied to the accounts as a whole.

The Euro-elections in June 2009 offer the public a chance to elect those who will defend their interests, who will insist on controlling where their money is going. The EU costs Britons £40 million a day and we all deserve that so much of what is ours is not wasted in fraud.

by Marta Andreassen was the chief accountant for the European Commission. She is standing for the UK Independence Party in the SE Region

Source >  TIMES online | nov 10

Copyright © - EFFEDIEFFE - all rights reserved.
Link a questo articolo : http://www.effedieffe.com/content/view/5218/152/