Europe's official financial watchdog, the European Court of Auditors, this week refused to approve the EU's accounts for the 11th year in a row, because they are once again riddled with mistakes and evidence of fraud.
More or less every area of the EU's operations is affected, with the biggest problems in the two biggest areas of EU spending farm subsidies and regional development. At least things seem to be improving a bit, said Stephen Castle in The Independent: this year the Court is satisfied with a third of EU spending, compared with just 6% last year.
Yet the timing is nevertheless awful for Brussels, said Anthony Browne in The Times. Next month, the Commission hopes to get European leaders to agree a e1,000 billion, seven-year Budget; the accounting shambles is not going to help their case. Nor will it exactly help persuade British politicians to compromise on the UK Budget rebate.
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The truly shocking aspect of the whole hideous mess is how little it shocks anyone these days, said Tory MEP Daniel Hannan in The Daily Telegraph. It seems "we are so blas about Brussels fraud that we no longer notice it".
Yet the plain fact is that big chunks of the EU's £70bn spend are being lost or stolen. "While the auditors are happy to vouch for the money raised by the EU", they simply cannot say where it goes thanks to ludicrously lax accounting standards and an underlying attitude to expenditure that "is at best negligent and at worst corrupt".
Unfortunately, the only two people to have lost their jobs over EU fraud (Marta Andreasen and Paul van Buitenen) were not fraudsters but high-level whistle-blowers, said Stephen Pollard in the Daily Mail. "The damning truth is that fraud runs through the very heart of the EU." Someone, somewhere, is paying for all the non-existent olive-farms and fantasy sheep. "And the someone is you".
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