Madam President, I wish to begin by thanking the members of Committee on Budgetary Control for their kind cooperation with me in preparation of this report, both individually and by group. I want also to thank Commissioner Schreyer for her regular attendance at our meetings and for the help and expertise that her staff provided. I especially want to thank the staff of our own Committee on Budgetary Control who were most diligent and expert and generous with their time, despite being moved around a lot recently, which is not very helpful. Nevertheless, I could not be more full of praise for them. I also want to thank Mr Bourlanges, who laid out the strategy for this report. We started out with 65 paragraphs and ended up with 95. I am not going to try to summarise the report because it would take far too long. I am going to mention its principal features. The main feature of this report on the budget for the financial year 2000 was the surplus of EUR 11 billion (or 14%). That figure requires some explanation. Firstly, more than EUR 2 billion came from revenue. I do not think that any national government would apologise for having taken in too much revenue. Another factor is the reserve of EUR 800 million. Again, the reserve is there not to be spent if possible. It should not be included in the surplus. When other details are taken into consideration, we had a real surplus of around 9%. Of that 7.2% could be said to come from the Structural Funds. If the Structural Funds are taken out of the calculation, there was no problem with the rest of the budget. On the Structural Funds, the regulations were completed in mid-1999. The new Commission came in at that time. It was never a possibility, considering the detail and the complications of this regulation, that our objectives for spending in the year 2000 could be achieved. This brings us to the point of the difficulty of these regulations. Most member governments did not submit their framework plans until the year 2000 itself. Some of them were not admissible at that time because of the difficulty of understanding the regulations. So, there was a problem. I would like to underline the fact that a German official told me that in the six-year programme ending in 1999, there were 60 000 projects in Objective 1 areas of Germany alone. That gives us some idea of the extent of the problem of administering these funds, and there are about 500 staff members in the relevant Commission Directorate-General. The question of the Structural Funds has to be looked at in depth. All the institutions of the Union have to apply themselves to simplifying the regulations by which we implement European regional policy before the new programme comes in and before enlargement in four years' time. My next point is the topical question of fraud and irregularity. It is the duty of the Committee on Budgetary Control to identify failure in administration and propose solutions. That is why the message from the Committee on Budgetary Control must always be critical and risk sounding rather negative. The final responsibility for failure always rests with the European Commission, but the national governments spend most of the money. When we talk about the failure of the Commission, we are talking about its failure to control the national governments and the regional authorities, which is not always an easy task. The EU at all levels is a partnership with the national governments. If the Commission can be blamed for anything it is for failing to do its own public relations work, to stand up for itself and to stand up to the national governments when they are in breach of the regulations. In the discharge procedure we expect to make a political decision on the performance of the Commission. We in the Committee on Budgetary Control do that on the basis of a report from the Court of Auditors and the Commission's annual financial statement. The Committee on Budgetary Control passed the discharge by a vote of something like 17 to 4. That is a resounding vote of confidence in the work that the Commission has done in the year 2000. However, we have not overlooked the weaknesses in the system and our motion for a resolution proposes changes and improvements both in planning and administration. We are looking for better cooperation between the Court of Auditors, Parliament and the Commission in the implementation of European policies and more efficient spending of European money. The last point I want to address is the failure of the Court of Auditors to give a statement of assurance. We should point out that it gave a statement of assurance in relation to revenue and administration. We have set out our solutions in paragraph 44. We would like to see figures for the rate of error. We would like to see figures which would enable us to compare one year with another. But we would like the statement of assurance of the Court of Auditors in relation to the revenue side of the budget and administration to be clearer. The only information we have about the rate of fraud and error comes from the Commission's statement for the year 2000. It would appear that the rate of fraud and error is about EUR 2 billion, or about 2.5% of the entire budget. Of this, about 10% of traditional own resources seems to involve a serious problem. If that is taken out of the calculation, the rate of fraud and error, as best we can make it out, is about 1%. I tried to establish how other States deal with this problem and I find the only comparable systems are in the United States and the Netherlands. By the standards that they apply, I want to state categorically that the Commission would pass with first-class honours: our rate of fraud and error is below what is acceptable in those countries. So while we have readjustments to make and recommendations for improvements, at the same time we do not want to overemphasise the negative aspects of our report. Finally, I would like to see us aim for a situation where the Court of Auditors would present us with a statement which could be read in reasonable time by members of the Committee on Budgetary Control. We could then prepare a statement that could be read and understood by Members of this Parliament, by members of national parliaments and students of European politics. We have failed to do that so far. I hope that my successors will achieve something that can be understood by European citizens. – 2000 Discharge: 6th, 7th and 8th EDF

Political group: PPE-DE