Billions of euro of EU funds misspent in error, fraud cases up - auditors

Last year, more than €5 billion of European Union funds were misappropriated, according to the bloc's auditors. This was due to national authorities making mistakes in allocating money, and cases of suspected fraud increasing.

The European Court of Auditors (ECA), responsible for assessing EU budgets, reported in its annual report that 3% of the €181.5bn spending last year was irregular. This is up from 2.7% the year before.

Auditors stated that "the level of error in high-risk spending was pervasive," and issued an "adverse opinion", referring to the 27-nation bloc’s spending last year.

Auditors noted that most errors were caused by difficulties in applying complicated rules and criteria to select beneficiaries. They said that this did not indicate fraud or waste of money.

They did however identify 15 instances of fraud, an increase from the six cases in the previous assessment.

Although opinions of auditors do not have immediate consequences, they could be used to encourage investigations into suspect fraud. Authorities should use them to improve spending in the following years.

The majority of EU funds are spent by the national and local governments in the 27 EU member countries.

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