Europese Commissie zal zich feller verdedigen tegen rekenkamersonderzoek (en)

The European Commission has signalled it will defend itself more vigorously than before against criticism on how it manages the EU's money, as the Court of Auditors gears up to deliver another negative report. The court is expected to give a negative review of 2005 EU accounting standards to MEPs in the budgetary control committee on Monday (23 October) evening, in what is set to be the 12th critical report in row.

The annual audit tends to generate a lot of negative publicity for the commission - which spends around 20 percent of the EU budget - although the main culprits are usually member states, which fail to account for 80 percent of the €100 billion a year EU budget.

MEPs plan to criticise the European Commission more harshly this year than last year, as 2005 was the first full year under president Jose Manuel Barroso's team.

But Siim Kallas, the commission vice-president in charge of audit and anti-fraud, has made his own counter-attack ahead of the debate, suggesting that the auditors themselves do not play fair in their reports. He claims they ignore the fact that money mis-spent one year is often clawed back the next year, while drawing critical conclusions from analysis of just a small number of transactions.

Mr Kallas points out that the EU executive got back €2.17 billion of mis-spent EU cash from member states in 2005 and wrote off just €90 million, UK media say. "You lost your wallet and you get it back with some money inside, but you still consider it a catastrophe. This is our main debate with the Court of Auditors," the commissioner said, according to the BBC.

Each April, the European Parliament signs off or "discharges" the previous year's spending, paving the way for adoption of the following year's budget, following a debate on the auditors' findings. Delaying the discharge can put pressure on the commission or member states to make changes, while refusing to discharge the budget can damage confidence in the commission, with the discharge mechanism at the heart of the fall of the Santer commission in 1998.