EU looks to recoup €5bn from member states

The EU will be seeking to recoup about €5bn from member states after the European Court of Auditors says the rules were not followed in schemes worth about 4% of money spent last year.

Kevin Cardiff, the Irish member of the court, said while the error rate for spending was not much greater than in 2010, it was still too much.

“In some sectors up to 40% of cases were found to contain some kind of error. While 96% of the money is OK, we do not see every case, and as a European citizen you could not be 100% happy,” he said.

Mr Cardiff, a former head of the Department of Finance, said that at a time when countries were cutting back on spending because of the economic crisis, the EU must be even more careful with its funding.

While many of the errors were found in spending on agriculture and regional policy, some should have been identified by the member states, he said. One example of this was a farm building that when eventually examined by the auditors was found to be a house, paid for with EU funds.

The majority of errors were found to be the responsibility of the member states that spent most of the €129.4bn EU budget in 2011, and Mr Cardiff said he believed more of them should have been identified at source.

This is the 18th year the Court of Auditors has found an error rate that precludes them giving the account a clean bill of health — the error rate would need to be less than 2% of the total sum spent.