Mr President, Commissioner, Madam Chairman of the Committee on Budgetary Control, Helmut, fellow Socialist Members and Members from the other political groups who have worked with us: I believe we can be satisfied with the work we have done to date on the discharge of the budget of 2001, which enjoyed broad consensus in Cocobu and which failed to win the support only of those who, out of ideological prejudice against the European institutions, consider this exercise to be more a means of checking their growing strength than an instrument for correcting their mistakes. We have before us a combination of problems and recommendations that constitute a genuine work programme, which, although not perfect, will enable both the Commission and us to make significant progress towards improving budgetary implementation. I therefore wish to focus more on the work that awaits us than on repeating what has happened in the past. Our first priority is the modernisation and upgrade of the Community accounting system; this modernisation must apply to the medium and long-term objectives and in relation to the crucial and immediate correction of its worst anachronisms. Following the measures that have already been adopted on the security and inviolability of data, we must put an end to the various and contradictory accounting practices which, as the director-general for the budget acknowledged in his last annual report, call into question the synchronisation and coherence of accounting data, replacing them with a single system that is comprehensible, reliable and transparent and which can be consulted, accessed, understood and used by all actors involved in the budget. What is particularly important is to bring a rapid end to the mechanisms that allow 20% of appropriations recovered from irregularities in the EAGGF-Guarantee to disappear, leaving no trace or record in the Community’s books, in sums and for purposes of which the Commission is unaware and much less controls. Then we have the problem which runs deeper and is more difficult to correct; that of systematic budgetary under-implementation, which in 2001 stood at more than EUR 15 billion, a colossal sum, which on its own exceeds the entire budget of several of the current Member States. I wish to reaffirm that the logic of irresponsibility that in this field frequently haunts the Community institutions and which always finds someone else to blame, must end. It is up to the Commission to propose the regulatory framework in which to develop programmes for budgetary implementation; it is up to the Commission to make budgetary proposals both on an annual basis and in accordance with the financial perspective; it is therefore up to the Commission to ensure that budgetary programmes are feasible and realistic. If the legislative and budgetary authority wishes to submit to the Commission proposals that it considers unfeasible, the Commission simply has to enforce its right of initiative and refuse to enshrine the proposal in law. For most Community appropriations there are powers of codecision with structures of a national, regional or other nature. If, however, there are problems of implementation on the part of the management partners, the Commission must make these known in a transparent way and in good time, enabling the due corrective measures to be taken. What is unacceptable is that, given deeply mediocre budgetary implementations that involve almost all non-Community partners in programme management, the Commission continues to claim that this is not its responsibility and that there is nothing more it should be doing. We have paid particular attention in this field to the programme of structural aid for agriculture in the countries applying for EU membership (the Sapard Programme). We are very pleased and note with optimism the guarantees given by Commissioner Fischler to the effect that he will attach the greatest priority to this programme’s implementation. We shall examine the results closely. We also feel that we must make the greatest efforts to raise the awareness of our colleagues in the inter-parliamentary delegations of the need to speed up this programme’s implementation. Lastly, I wish to draw attention to the need for crucial measures to be adopted on the way in which the Commission deals with companies with which it has contractual relations. It is deeply regrettable that the Commission is not even able to detail the number of contracts with third parties through which it implements an extremely substantial part of its own budget and is therefore even less in a position to establish an appropriate ex-post mechanism to monitor not only the legality and regularity, but also the transparency and efficiency of these contracts. It is symptomatic that in relation to Eurostat, a body on which this Parliament focused its attentions in the recent report by Mr Bösch, it has already been concluded that an audit of such contracts signed in recent years cannot be completed within the deadline that has been set, because there are more than 2000 of these contracts. What is known as ‘externalisation’, in other words, the management of Community services by bodies outside the Commission, is doubtless a policy that must not only be maintained but must in many cases also be developed. This externalisation, however, needs to be supervised more actively, more coherently and not in a way that merely goes through the motions. Approving this report will consequently be less a point of arrival and more a point of departure. I hope to be able, in this work, to continue to count on the cooperation that I have enjoyed to date from the Commission services, in particular from the directorates-general for the budget and for agriculture, which I wish publicly to thank. I also count on the cooperation of Cocobu as a whole. (Applause)

Political group: PSE