The EU’s top financial auditor has sounded the alarm on an orgy of squandered funds this month in the wake of COVID, the Ukraine crisis, and the much-vaunted Green Deal, with 4.2% of the EU’s total €196 billion annual budget misspent in 2022 alone.
The EU’s Court of Auditors made the ominous warning as it presented its annual audit of the Union’s accounts, where it stated that the errors in the EU’s budget spiked to €8.2 billion last year, up from just under €6 billion in 2021.
Auditors found “material and pervasive” errors in almost all of the EU’s accounting as they criticised the sloppy manner in which European beancounters signed off on expenditures.
Among the many examples of misspent funds included €440 million wasted by the EU in Belgium caused by a calculation error in the collection of customs duties not detected for over two years, as well as one lucky Italian farmer pocketing an unknown amount of EU cash for non-existent lemon trees.
Additional examples of dodgy expenditures outside the EU included €17 million on a school in the Ivory Coast where the equipment was found to be unused or missing, as well as serious VAT irregularities on a €16 million healthy food project for high school students in Malawi.
President of the Court of Auditors Tony Murphy testified to MEPs before the Parliament’s Budget Committee earlier this month, saying that this was the fourth consecutive year that the EU’s budget was given a poor bill of health. He added that it was next to impossible to calculate fraud in the EU’s €723.8 billion recovery fund.
His critical remarks were downplayed by Austrian EU Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn, as MEPs in attendance warned that the errors could be adding fuel to the fire for Eurosceptics and even questioned the very purpose of COVID recovery funds after the pandemic.
“If auditors wrote such a damning report about a business, its CEO and directors would be expected to resign,” opined the director of the think tank MCC Brussels, Frank Furedi, as he concluded that the sloppy accounting was only set to continue. The think tank also lambasted the €1.6 million given to EU-approved fact-checkers as part of the EU’s €195 billion budget for 2024, warning about the creation of a new “ministry of truth” by Eurocrats.
The waste could very well accelerate as MEPs recently approved a €75 billion bailout for the EU’s coffers driven by the war in Ukraine. The bloc also seeks to absorb the Western Balkans over the next decade, a move that could further destabilise Brussels’ accounts as member states already quibble about the costs of the post-bellum reconstruction of Ukraine.
