Name: Committee on Budgetary Control Ordinary meeting
Uploaded: 2026-07-14T12:30:00+00:00
Duration: 3936 s

06:21 - 07:15

Speaker 2

Colleagues, I would like to invite you to adjourn our meeting today of the CONT Committee. We have had very interesting votes and I'm very happy that you are back. We come now to item number 12, which is the special report 18 from 2026 of the Commission's anti-fraud strategy. The rapporteur is our former colleague in the European Parliament, also in the Internal Market Committee, Ildikó Gáll-Pelcz. A warm welcome to you.

And I would like to give you the floor first. And then for the Commission, we have Mr. James Sweeney. He's a director in OLAF of the Directorate C Anti-Fraud Knowledge Centre. And like that, we have a very rich introduction that will be then followed by our colleague Dick Eriksson, who is following the file in this committee. So I would like to give you the floor, dear Ildikó, for your introduction, please.

07:15 - 11:35

Speaker 1

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Andreas. I am pleased to present the European Court of Auditors' special report on the European Commission's anti-fraud strategy.

Fraud represents a significant risk to the EU budget and can undermine public confidence in how EU funds are managed. Our audit assessed whether the Commission has put in place an effective framework to prevent, detect, and respond to fraud affecting the EU budget. Here is just a quick outline of what I am going to present today. Please next slide. Why this area was focused upon, what we audited, what we found, and finally what we recommend.

And let's begin. The Commission manages almost 200 billion euros EU expenditure every year together with the member states. Protecting these resources and the financial interests of the EU are a major part of its core responsibilities. At the same time, fraud risks continue to evolve. Digitalization, increasingly complex funding programs, and the growing use of artificial intelligence create new opportunities for fraud.

This is why we consider it important to assess whether the Commission's anti-fraud strategy remains fit for purposes. And what did we audit? Next slide. It's important to stress that we didn't investigate individual fraud cases. This falls within the responsibilities of OLAF and the European Public Prosecutor's Office.

Instead, we assessed whether the Commission has established an effective anti-fraud framework. In particular, we examined governance arrangements, fraud risk assessment, action plans, monitoring, and reporting. An important element is the anti-fraud framework itself, so it was important for us to examine how anti-fraud responsibilities are organized within the Commission. Let's see. At corporate, at the corporate level, the College of Commissioners set the overall anti-fraud strategy.

Individual Commission departments are responsible for developing and implementing their own departmental anti-fraud strategies with guidance and coordination provided at the corporate level. The audit assessed whether these governance arrangements provided effective oversight, ensured consistent implementation across departments, and supported a coordinated approach to managing fraud risk where OLAF is central. Let's see main findings. Overall, we found that the Commission's anti-fraud strategy is comprehensive and broadly follows recognized international good practices. However, we identified three important weaknesses.

First, fraud risk assessments are not always sufficiently robust and don't systematically consider all relevant information sources or emerging risks. Second, many actions included in the action plans are not ambitious enough or lack measurable objectives. Finally, monitoring and reporting focus mainly on whether activities have been completed rather than on whether they reduce fraud risk or improve performance. In short, the framework exists, but it doesn't yet provide sufficient evidence that it delivers measurable results. Now to move to our recommendations.

Based on these findings, we made four recommendations. We recommend strengthening governance and corporate oversight, improving fraud risk assessment, making action plans more ambitious and measurable, and focusing monitoring and reporting on results and impact.