The activities associated with staff representation must be taken into consideration when the staff reports of the officials concerned are drawn up, in such a way that they are not penalised for carrying out such activities. Consequently, even though the assessor and appeal assessor are authorised solely to assess the performance in the post to which he is assigned of an official who has a mandate as staff representative, to the exclusion of the activities connected with that mandate, which are not within their competence, they must none the less take account of the constraints connected with the exercise of those duties as staff representative. More specifically, they must take account (where appropriate) of the fact that the number of days' work which the official concerned has been able to provide in his department is less than the normal number of working days in the reference period as provided for in the Staff Regulations. The proficiency and work of that official must therefore be assessed, for the purposes of the staff report, on the basis of the performance which the institution is normally entitled to expect from an official of the same grade during a period corresponding to the time he has actually devoted to his activity in the branch to which he is posted after deducting the time spent, under the conditions laid down in the Staff Regulations, in his activity as staff representative.

Although, where an institution has not adopted a special system for reporting on officials performing staff representation activities, the assessors are not competent to evaluate those activities, that is not the case where an ad hoc assessment system has been set up for those officials.

Thus, in the system introduced at the Commission, an ad hoc staff reports group and, where appropriate, an ad hoc joint appeals committee are required to intervene.

The purpose of consulting the ad hoc staff reports group is to provide the assessor with the information he needs to assess the duties which the subject of the report performs as a staff or trade union representative, given that those duties are regarded as forming part of the services which such an official is required to provide in his institution. Furthermore, under the second indent of the sixth paragraph of Article 3 and Article 5 of the general provisions adopted by the Commission for the implementation of Article 43 of the Staff Regulations, the assessor is required to consult the ad hoc staff reports group before drawing up the preliminary draft report.

It follows that the assessor is required to take account of the opinion of the ad hoc staff reports group when drawing up the staff report of an official performing staff representation or trade union activities. However, he is not obliged to follow that opinion. If he does not, he must then explain the reasons which led him to depart from it. Simply attaching the opinion to the staff report is not sufficient to be regarded as satisfying the requirement to provide a statement of reasons.

Those principles also apply, mutatis mutandis, to the opinion of the ad hoc joint appeals committee. According to Annex II of the general provisions implementing Article 43 of the Staff Regulations, the opinion of that committee must be taken into account by the appeal assessor when drawing up the staff report.

(see paras 51-56) See: Maurissen v Court of Auditors, cited earlier