Report from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament. Member States’ replies to the Court of Auditors’ 2012 annual report

This report is an analysis of the Member States' replies to the European Court of Auditors' (the Court) annual report for budgetary year 2012 and fulfils the obligations defined in article 162(5) of the Financial Regulation.

The Court’s audit results showed that for 2012 the consolidated accounts presented the financial position of the Union fairly and that they were free from any material misstatements. However, for expensed payments the Court’s conclusion was that they were materially affected by error and the related control systems examined were partially effective for all expenditure areas except administrative expenditure, which was free from errors. For the budget as a whole, the most likely error rate had increased from 3.9% in 2011 to 4.8% in 2012. The Court identified that eligibility errors accounted for a significant proportion of the estimated overall error rate. Finally, the Court highlighted that shared management expenditure, which represents 80% of EU expenditure, contributed significantly to the estimated overall error rates and that many of the errors found could have been detected by better first-line controls at the level of the Member States.

This report analyses the replies provided by Member States under three main thematic headings:
(1) Performance – Getting results from the EU budget
(2) Eligibility and accuracy errors and
(3) Improving controls and systems.

• Primary Source

EUR-Lex: COM(2014)120: Follow the progress of this report through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2014:120:FIN

EUR-Lex: SWD(2014)60: Commission Staff Working Document accompanying the report http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=SWD:2014:060:FIN

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