Mr President, I would like to congratulate Mr Casaca on his excellent report. My group will of course support it. The integrated administration and control system is actually the central plank of our present agriculture policy. We need reliable information on final beneficiaries, the number of animals kept and the surface area being cultivated. This is a difficult task which is only possible at all by virtue of technological progress. Mr Casaca’s report covers this to a considerable extent. Welcome as this is, we should nevertheless not lose sight of the fact that this will involve changeover problems. We learnt that when the present system was introduced under the 1992 regulation. Today, eight years later, two Member States have not yet implemented the system at all or only in part. We cannot allow delays of this kind to occur again. This subject was addressed at the time of the 1998 final discharge. The Commission informed us that the advance payments for these two countries, Greece and Portugal, had been reduced. That alone is not enough. In such cases there must be tangible sanctions that really bite, linked to the process of clearing the accounts. In connection with the final discharge, the Commission also presented the 1998 monitoring statistics to us. I do not want to burden you with figures here, but I will perhaps give you a short extract. In 1998 in the 15 Community Member States there were more than 3 million applications for “area” aid. Of these, some 12% were checked, partly on the spot and partly by satellite. Of those applications checked, over 40% were inaccurate. We should not of course immediately assume that deception was intended in every case. In some cases, there were technical oversights, in others misunderstandings about interpreting the rules, and so on. Nevertheless, these amounts add up to millions of course. These figures therefore demonstrate just how urgently a properly functioning control system is required. As the European Parliament rapporteur responsible for anti-fraud measures, I would like to bring a serious problem in this area to your attention. All the Member States report any irregularities to the Commission, but only a few Member States tell the Commission which of these cases are classified as fraudulent. For example, according to the statistics, in the United Kingdom there were 4 995 cases of over-declaration, 971 cases of duplicate applications and 52 cases of “false” applications. But not one of these cases was classified in the statistics as being fraudulent or as giving rise to suspicions of “serious negligence”. Finland, Austria, Portugal and Sweden do not report any such cases either. So is there a kind of fraud-free zone in the EU? I very much doubt it. The problem we have here also occurs in other budget areas. The administrative controls more or less work, but we do not have a reliable overview of criminal aspects. This problem needs to be solved as a matter of urgency if we really want effective deterrence in order to combat fraud. The ideal way of achieving this is to set up a European public prosecutor’s office for financial matters, which this House has repeatedly called for.

Political group: PSE