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Noses In The Trough
The European Union's court of auditors has refused to declare EU accounts clean for the ninth year on the trot. Only a tiny nine percent of the total budget for 2002 received a clean bill of health. The remaining 91 percent, according to the auditors, was riddled with errors or otherwise unverifiable.
The BBC notes that aid to farmers, which makes up almost half of the EU's 100 billion Euro budget, was particularly dodgy. However, it's the Daily Telegraph, as ever, which gets its teeth into the story:
Checks on subsidy claims for suckler cows found that 50.2 per cent of animals in Portugal and 31.2 per cent in Italy were false. The "error rate" in forage and crop acreage was 89.7 per cent in Luxembourg, 42.9 per cent in Sweden, 34.5 per cent in France and 19.2 per cent in Britain, despite increased use of satellite photography to spot fraud.
Things aren't helped by the European Commission's refusal to date to employ modern accounting practices, meaning that few transactions are properly recorded. Which seems to suit the scammers.
It's not only the farmers who have their noses in the trough. They have to budge up to make room for those stressed-out Eurocrats who take early retirement, often very early in their 'careers':
The court suggested that EU staff were abusing the disability system on a large scale, costing taxpayers £54 million a year. Half the claimants had psychological or stress-related complaints. A court official said: "These are not coal miners or deep-sea fishermen. It's not normal for so many to retire for ill-health."
Most of the invalids are in their 30s or 40s, securing life-time pensions worth 70 per cent of the final retirement-age salaries.
And then of course, come the MEPs, ever eager to exploit the numerous allowances on offer. These guardians of democracy can pad their pension funds with office allowances (funded by Europe's long-suffering taxpayers). MEPs can make £120,000 a year from this scam alone, says the Telegraph. British MEPs are said to be among the worst culprits when it comes to employing spouses, and let's not forget the great EU tradition of pocketing fully-reimbursed first class air fares even after travelling economy class.
The report will make depressing reading for commission president Romano Prodi, who took charge with a promise to clean up the EU's accounts.
As the EU Observer notes,
2002 was the year when the Commission's former chief accountant, Marta Andreasen went public with her accusations that the Commission’s accounting systems are open to fraud and mismanagement.
Prodi's commission has already been damaged by the Eurostat scandal - this thumbs down from the EU's own financial watchdog will intensify calls for heads to roll. Could hog heaven soon beckon for the EU's fraudsters?
