EU claims "clean bill of health" for failed accounts

The EU Commission has bizarrely announced a "clean bill of health for EU accounts" on its website.  I say "bizarrely" because the EU Court of Auditors has refused to sign off the EU's accounts for the 16th year in a row.

This doesn't even qualify as propaganda because propaganda implies some element of truth and this is an outright lie.

If a public company couldn't get its accounts signed off for a year it would be expected to de-list from the stock market, investors would lose confidence and the company would suffer sever sanctions for breaking company law.  The EU hasn't had it's accounts signed off by its own internal auditors for 16 years and it gets more power and more money.

The EU is as bent as a €9 note, the British government shouldn't hand over another penny until they deal with the endemic fraud and corruption that infests every department of the corrupt superquango.

MEP CANDIDATES QUESTION CLAIMS BY EU’S CHIEF ACCOUNTANT

Two of the UKIP MEP candidates for the European elections in June 2009 were among a handful of accountants from business who attended a presentation of the EU accounts on Tuesday evening (11.11.08) at the Chartered Accountants Hall in the City of London. Andrew Smith and Michael McGough are both chartered accountants and they are number 3 and 6 on the Eastern Counties UKIP candidate list.

Despite continuing high error rates amounting to £5.02 billion of mis-spent funds in 2007, the EU’s Chief Accountant claims he received a clean report for last year. The presentation was made by Brian Gray, the British chartered accountant who replaced Marta Andreasen as Chief Accountant of the EU. Ms Andreasen was sacked by the EU after she refused to sign defective accounts, and she is standing as a UKIP MEP candidate in the South East. Mr McGough pointed out that Mr Gray’s claim was inconsistent with the auditor’s report and an investigation is under way.

Andrew Smith was particularly shocked when David Bostock of the European Court of Auditors stated that "Nobody seems to care if [there is] a high rate of error [in the EU accounts] for Structural Funds, except a few extreme Eurosceptics. Nobody suggests stopping these programmes due to a high rate of error". After the meeting Mr Smith said: “UKIP cares and would certainly stop such programmes as the auditor's casual approach to errors is totally unacceptable. In 2007 the EU had to recover wrongful payments of EUR 1.5 billion but the amount which was irrecoverable was not disclosed."

Michael McGough expressed amazement that Brian Gray's preferred solution when recipients of EU funds could not or would not comply with spending conditions was to make the conditions easier to meet. “It appears that an error rate of 2 per cent is accepted quite happily by the EU and up to 20 per cent in some overseas aid programmes. If such an error rate were made by Essex County Council, for example, there would be uproar.”

EU budget: the missing €6 billion

Via UKIP.org

After 14 years of trying, the European Union has finally managed to have its budget passed – even though the auditors say they have no idea where €6 billion have gone

The European Court of Auditors said it had signed off the budget, to which the UK contributes £40 million a day, but it added that it could not trace the missing €6 billion.

UKIP MEP Jeffrey Titford, who sits on the Budgetary Committee of the European Parliament, said it was beyond belief that with so much public money missing the budget had still been passed.

Marta Andreassen, a former chief accountant for the EU and now a UKIP candidate for the 2009 Euro-elections, said the systems of financial control were so complex that the auditors had no way of telling where fraud began or ended.

Following the release of the ECA report, UKIP issued a statement in which it said:

"The report claims to have passed the accounts in an 'unqualified' way and yet it also states that 'the Court cannot provide a clean opinion.' The truth is that the ECA is a European institution and therefore has been politicised in order that it sanitise the devastating truth about the accounts."

Eastern Counties MEP Jeffrey Titford added: "Year after year the European Parliament goes through the motions of considering the Court of Auditor's report and its failure to approve the EU's accounts, and each time, over the strenuous objections of a tiny minority of people like myself, the Parliament tamely nods through the accounts.

"Fourteen years of failure, 14 years of grotesque mismanagement of public money and 14 years of mealy-mouthed acquiescence by most British MEPs is enough. If any British MEP either votes to approve the EU's 2007 accounts or abstains from the vote, then his or her party should not receive a single vote in next year's European parliamentary election. The politicians are failing us, therefore, it is time for the public to act by holding them responsible at the ballot box."

Marta Andreassen said the ECA had asserted without room for doubt that they had found at least €6 billion to have been wrongly paid out in 2007 from the European Union Budget. The court said it did not imply the transactions were illegal or irregular, or that there was fraud, Mrs Andreassen went on. They added that "only if funds have intentionally been improperly claimed can we talk about fraud." But the court had failed to produce an analysis on the intentionality of the improper claims.

"They confirm that the improvements said to have been made in the control of the use of EU funds do not change the overall negative opinion given in prior years.

"The court confirms that it is the Commission that retains overall responsibility for the execution of the budget and is accountable for this to the European Parliament and Council. So, can we please ask the European Parliament and the Council to call the Commission to account for their persistent failure in managing European taxpayers' money."

The Brussels accounts scandal must be stopped -by Marta Andreassen

We have a right to know where the EU's millions end up.Here we go again. Today, for the 14th year in a row, the European Court of Auditors will unveil their report, telling us that they refuse to clear the EU accounts. What's worse, no one will really seem to care. We are told that the accounts won't be cleared until 2020 - if then.

Having worked inside the Brussels nomenklatura and having being sacked for my insistence that financial controls have to be strengthened, I am not surprised to find that nothing has changed other than the arguments deployed to defend this state of affairs. What the auditors have been saying for years is that most of the payments made by the Commission from its £70 billion-a- year budget cannot be deemed legal or regular. That is, that they cannot confirm those payments have been made to the correct person for the correct purpose and for the correct amount. It stretches credulity to insist, as the Europhiles do, that this does not mean that there is fraud.

Because the payments are made to beneficiaries in the member countries it's easy enough for the institutions to put the blame on those recipients. Which is what they do, claiming that the problem is one of insufficient attention being paid to the paperwork. But who designed the paperwork that no one understands or completes? And who doesn't insist on it being completed? The institutions themselves, of course. Because this control is missing there is no way to protect against fraud or even to uncover it.We might not expect the European Union to be whiter than white, but we should at least hold them to the standard of being competent. Who is to blame for this situation? The Members of the European Parliament. For those 14 years they've been allowing this situation to continue.

It's not just that too many have gone native, dreaming of their part in constructing that shimmering vision of “Europe”. It's that they've forgotten what a Parliament is for, which is not simply to pass legislation, but to hold those who implement it to account. Only a complete cynic would note that those who do complain, those who do insist that this situation must change, start to find their own activities, their own expense accounts, say, subjected to audits of much greater detailed scrutiny than are applied to the accounts as a whole.

The Euro-elections in June 2009 offer the public a chance to elect those who will defend their interests, who will insist on controlling where their money is going. The EU costs Britons £40 million a day and we all deserve that so much of what is ours is not wasted in fraud.

Marta Andreassen was the chief accountant for the European Commission but was sacked for exposing the corruption of the EU. She is standing for the UK Independence Party in the SE Region for the 2009 Euro elections.