The secrecy surrounding the audit report reminds us of tales from the Cold War era.
Summary of the Secret Audit Report of the EP
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
Last week the EUD revealed some key information on a secret report presented before the Committee on Budgetary Control of the European Parliament. The highlight in this particular document is that it contains proof that unknown MEPs have abused the system by various means. The bottom line is that apparently fraud did happen in the Parliament, more than one time, yet due to the secret nature of the audit report, the public is left in the dark. Furthermore, the document has been secreted away rather fast and is, at the moment, out of reach for anyone. This week we follow this story with more information on the contents of the report as revealed within a summary written by Dutch MEP Paul van Buitenen.
The report remains secret
As the preeminent member of the EUDemocrats, Jens-Peter Bonde said, “Members are – as all citizens - innocent until the opposite is proved and they must have the right to defend themselves before publication.” Indeed, publishing the audit report with the names for the media to see would severely damage the image and reputation of those MEPs listen within, even if some might have conclusive proof of their innocence. However, there is no democratic reason for the lack of transparency the EP leadership is showing. Publishing a version of the report without any names would simply allow the citizens and media of the Union to be aware of issues they are directly interested in. After all, who pays for the EU budget if not its citizens? Any threat to the correct use of that particular budget should not be kept secreted away from those who are democratically entitled to know who is doing foul play with their money.
The summary
A summary of the report was recently published and you can see it here, by the Dutch MEP Paul van Buitenen. While being held by the same secrecy clause that prevented Mr. Bonde to read the report, the summary does shed some light into the intricacies of the European Parliament’s financial system. The report itself is shown to have only analyzed a sample of payments and cases, which would lead to the conclusion that any irregularity found would indeed be proportionally reproduced at a larger scale in the total of EP budgetary usage.
We will highlight for you some particularly interesting parts. One instance of irregularities is the ways MEPs use their right to contract a service provider who is to be paid from the Parliament’s budget. This was found to have been abused: either the service provider had to few or no assistants found providing help to the MEP, or even a completely irrelevant activity field. We can understand from this that an unknown number of MEPs abused the rules and deducted funds from the Parliament for completely unrelated issues.
There is more to be found, however. In one instance a single assistant was figured in the registries to having received a €8,890 monthly salary, accumulated from 5 MEPs during a 3 month lay-off period. Other MEPs drastically increased the allowances they paid their assistance in the same lay-off period, with as much as 117%, in order to get the maximum amount of money out of the budget. The information becomes dramatically more mind-bending: in one case a service-providing company to one MEP was found to be actually owned by him and have no real business whatsoever.
There is probably more than all this contained within the report itself. What becomes clear, however, is that the information it contains does not deal just with small irregularities, or mistakes. Apparently, there are continuous and conscientious illegal, fraud-related activities being conducted within the European Parliament. Why have all these issues not been released to the tax payers and voters remains, alongside with the full content of the report, a mystery.