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European Union (Amendment) Bill

I dispute the fact that it is not working; the Court of Auditors does its job very well. Members of the Committee have already commented on the fact that this is the 13th year in succession that we have not had what I would describe as a clean bill of health. We are not happy about that—we are concerned. However, this is not equivalent to finding fraud. Most of the irregularities that the court has found have been genuine errors which are later rectified. As in previous years, the court has said that the transactions underlying the financial statements for 2006 were legal and regular in respect of revenue, commitments and administrative payments. Further, there has been some improvement from the 6 per cent of accounts that it signed off in 2003, the 35 per cent signed off in 2004 to just over 40 per cent in 2006. Much of its difficulty in giving a positive statement arises from the areas of expenditure which are jointly managed by the EC and member states. This was almost 80 per cent of the EU budget funding in 2006. We are talking in large part about making sure that those procedures function effectively and not about allegations of fraud. The fact that so many errors are rectified later does not mean that the court is not able to do its job properly. That is incredibly important.