PURPOSE: presentation of the EU Court of
Auditors’ report on the annual accounts of EUROJUST for the
financial year 2010, together with the Centre’s
reply.
CONTENT: in accordance with the tasks conferred on the
Court of Auditors by the Treaty on the Functioning of the European
Union, the Court presents to the European Parliament and to the
Council, in the context of the discharge procedure, a Statement of
Assurance as to the reliability of the annual accounts of each
institution, body or agency of the EU, and the legality and
regularity of the transactions underlying them, on the basis of an
independent external audit.
This audit concerned, amongst others, the annual
accounts of EUROJUST.
In the Court’s opinion, EUROJUST’s Annual
Accounts fairly present, in all material respects, its
financial position as of 31 December 2010 and the results of
its operations and its cash flows for the year then ended, in
accordance with the provisions of its Financial
Regulation.
The Court also considers that the transactions
underlying the annual accounts of EUROJUST for the financial
year ended 31 December 2010 are, in all material respects, legal
and regular.
The report confirms that EUROJUST’s 2010 budget
amounted to EUR 32.3 million. The number of staff employed by
EUROJUST at the end of the year was 295.
The report also makes a series of observations on the
budgetary and financial management
of
EUROJUST, accompanied by the latter’s response.
The main observations may be summarised as follows:
The Court’s observations:
- budgetary and financial management: the level of operational expenditure carried forward
to 2011 amounted to 38 % of the budget. This level of
carry-over was excessive and at odds with the principle of
annuality.
- governance: the Director
of EUROJUST is accountable to the discharge authority for all of
the duties detailed in the paragraph, ‘The Director’s
responsibility’. However the Court states that he is
not de facto responsible for the majority of the daily management
decisions, which are taken by the College of EUROJUST on the basis
of the relevant provisions of the founding Regulation. There
is scope to consider redefining the respective roles and
responsibilities of the actors involved to effectively deal with
this accountability overlap;
- recruitment: despite the
fact that recruitments cannot be made from expired reserve lists,
an official was recruited in 2010 using a reserve list which had
expired in January 2009.
EUROJUST’s response:
- due to higher activities in 2010, automatic
carry-overs increased compared to the previous year, mainly due to
IT costs. If one makes abstraction of these elements, there
was a reduction in carried forward as a whole on a like for like
basis;
- on governance, the College needs to rectify this
anomaly or a new regulation should redress this structural
deficiency;
- on recruitment,
although the documentation corresponding to the recruitment file
was not complete, the Acting Administrative Director at the time
confirmed having taken the decision for the extension of the
reserve list. In order to ensure that such a situation does not
arise in the future, EUROJUST will take measures to ensure that all
the decisions concerning recruitments are adequately
documented.
Lastly, the Court of Auditors’ report contains a
summary of EUROJUST’s activities in 2010. This is
focused on the following activities:
- coordination meetings on
current cases;
- dealing with cases on
fraud, drug trafficking, terrorism, human trafficking with a total
of 1424 cases.