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The EU auditors published a background paper on their approach, to provide a source of information for those interested in cohesion policy and its auditing.
The ECAs’ objective will be to determine whether the information provided by the EC on the legality and regularity of Cohesion spending is accurate, or not. In practice, under this modified approach, they will scrutinise the checks already carried out by the EC and by the audit authorities in Member States. This comprises the review of audit files and the re-performance of audit work already carried out at beneficiary level. Based on this, they will form a conclusion as to the reliability of the information provided by the EC for each of the programmes, including the estimated level of any residual error, and for the Cohesion area as a whole. This work will also inform their overall opinion on the legality and regularity of EU spending.
“This marks an important change in the way we audit cohesion spending”,said Mr Klaus-Heiner Lehne, the President of the ECA. “In our 2018-2020 strategy, we decided to take a fresh look at how we audit the EU budget and how we can increase the added value of our Statement of Assurance. For the 2014- 2020 period we expect to be able to take advantage of more mature internal control systems and the audits carried out by audit authorities in Member States. We could then move to providing an independent external assessment to the European Parliament and the Council of the reliability of the Commission’s information on the legality and regularity of Cohesion spending”.