In a report published Monday, July 4, the Court lists the multiple diversions and manipulations deployed by certain beneficiaries of the CAP, the first post of spending of the European Union, to escape the control of the Commission and the Member States.
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On paper, everything is fine, or roughly. In reality, fraud to the common agricultural policy (CAP), the first post of expenditure of the European Union budget (EU), are much more numerous than they seem to be. Indeed, the commission as the member states, which share the task of controlling the proper use of community funds, can, in certain cases, be permissive and let fraudsters act impunity. This is, in essence, the message from the European Court of Auditors, which published a report on the subject, Monday, July 4. The choice of subtitle of this publication – “It is time to attack the problem at the root” – is unambiguous.
The sums at stake are important. As the Luxembourg institution recalls, between 2018 and 2020, each year on average, direct payments to farmers (generally depending on the area of agricultural land available to operators) represented 38.5 billion euros, while Expenses related to market measures (intended to help certain sectors) and rural development amounted to 2.7 billion and 13.1 billion euros respectively. Over the 2016-2020 period, the irregularities reported concerned 0.09 % of the PAC payments. This figure “does not constitute a direct indicator of the degree of fraud, but rather of the results obtained by the Member States in their fight against fraud and other illegal activities involving the financial interests of the EU”, note the magistrates.
The report of the European Court of Auditors resembles a small manual of possible fraud which can easily escape the control of the Commission as well as member states, as it remains random and insufficient. We thus discover there that certain beneficiaries of community funds do not respect the conditions to which they are in theory submitted, without this being harmful to them. They “omit important information or artificially create the conditions allowing them to fulfill the eligibility criteria and to benefit unduly from PAC aid”, can be read.
“The more complex projects, The higher the risk “
Thus, the aid reserved for SMEs can be bypassed for the benefit of larger companies. In Bulgaria, for example, an investigation by the European Antifraude Wrestling Office (Olaf) revealed that agricultural actors, who had reached the ceiling for aid to which they were entitled, obtained community funds – about ten million euros – through other apparently independent entities, which were actually under their control. In this case, therefore, the fraudsters have been caught up, but given the holes in the nets of European controls, there is no doubt that many of their colleagues are getting unscathed.
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