Farm alarm

11 August 2008

Good news at last for the EU budget. The latest Commission anti-fraud report shows the number of cases of suspected farm subsidy irregularities fell dramatically in 2007, to 1,548 from a steady level of around 3,200 in the previous few years, writes Stephen Gardner. But hold on! Perhaps the news is not so good after all. A rule change quietly introduced by the Commission in 2006 no longer requires member states to report irregularities involving less than EUR 10,000, against the previous threshold of EUR 4,000. This, rather than improved agricultural payment systems and detection, is the reason for the drop. A Commission spokesman told Euro-correspondent.com the rule change was part of a "general simplification of the management of funds". The work of EU anti-fraud squad OLAF should certainly be simpler. They will need to do far less chasing of member states to see if frauds have duly been prosecuted and money recovered. By happy coincidence, the rule change came in as OLAF was undergoing an organisational reform, following criticism about the time it took to deal with cases and its general bungling. The rules have also been quietly modified in another way: member states no longer have to report on amounts recovered. As the average recovery rate from 2000 to 2006 was just 19 percent, perhaps it is best that this embarrassing figure be allowed to drop from public view... Overall, the message is clear: it's OK to defraud us, as long as it's less than EUR 10,000. Meanwhile, the Commission and OLAF can concentrate on a smaller number of big cases, and bask in the publicity when they bring multi-million euro offenders to book. A version of this article originally appeared in Private Eye.

 

< Prev		Next >