By Nicola Smith - 18th November 2003
European Commission chief Romano Prodi is expected today to announce a shake-up of the EU’s anti-fraud strategy in a bid to avoid another Eurostat scandal.
Parliament insiders believe that he is likely to announce changes to the European anti-fraud body OLAF, which has been criticised by MEPs and the commission for its sluggish response to the Eurostat affair.
Events at Eurostat, the EU’s statistical arm, where senior officials are suspected of having siphoned off millions of euro into secret bank accounts, came as a sharp shock to the commission earlier this year.
Internal audit service reports have since revealed that OLAF was slow to respond to evidence of the mounting scandal.
If major changes are proposed today, this would be the second major overhaul of the anti-fraud body in four years. OLAF is the recent successor of the former UCLAF which was tainted during the fall of the previous Santer Commission.
But as Prodi presents his plan to members of the parliament’s budgetary control committee and to the entire House in Strasbourg later today, MEPs are unlikely to let the commission off the hook too easily.
MEPs have already strongly criticised the commission for failing to clear up the Eurostat affair sooner and are still sceptical that the senior ranks of the commission knew nothing until this summer.
Paulo Casaca, the Portuguese MEP in charge of drafting the parliament’s response to the budget, said that the commission needed to make “clear and simple rules on responsibility.”
“We need to try and transform the philosophy of the commission and replace secrecy with transparency,” he said.
Prodi’s speech also comes on the back of a Court of Auditors report which showed that the radical reforms of the commission’s accounting system are still only making limited progress.
The annual report, which was presented last night by President of the Court of Auditors Juan Manuel Fabra Valles revealed that as in previous years the commission could not give positive assurances for just over 90 per cent of the EU’s €100 billion budget.
While recognising that 80 per cent of the budget is executed by the member states, the court points to several shortcomings in both national and commission control systems.
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