2013 discharge: EU general budget, European Commission and executive agencies

2014/2075(DEC)

FOLLOW-UP TO 2012 COMMISSION DISCHARGE - REPLIES TO REQUESTS FROM THE COUNCIL

This Commission Staff Working Paper completes the Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the Follow-up to the 2012 Discharge.

An overview of these replies may be found in the summary of COM(2014)0607 (please refer to the summary of the document in question).

This working document presents in detail the answers to 79 specific requests made by the Council in the comments accompanying its Recommendation on the 2012 Discharge.

Many of these requests have been classed under the following headings:

  • Chapter 1 - The Statement of Assurance and Supporting Information
  • Chapter 2 - Revenue
  • Chapter 3 - Agriculture: Market and Direct Support
  • Chapter 4 - Rural Development, Environment, Fisheries and Health
  • Chapter 5 - Regional Policy, Energy and Transport
  • Chapter 6 - Employment and Social Affairs
  • Chapter 7 - External Relations, Aid and Enlargement
  • Chapter 8 - Research and Other Internal Policies
  • Chapter 9 - Administrative and Other Expenditure

For each of these chapters, the Commission replies point by point to the Council’s requests and proposes a framework of appropriate measures where necessary.

Financial framework 2014-2020 and consistency with the Council’s requests: the Council calls on all actors in the Commission, the Court and Member States to take advantage of the new legal framework and to pursue efforts towards developing a performance framework as to ensure that expected results and impacts laid down in the sector-specific regulations are achieved. This includes, among others, a consistent application of SMART objectives, using milestones and suitable indicators to evaluate on an annual basis the performance of multiannual programmes and to ensure that the financial resources have been spent correctly.

The Commission has been working for several years to strengthen its performance framework through a step-by-step approach. It has:

  1. ensured that the legal bases of the 2014-2020 spending programmes include a more coherent framework for monitoring, evaluation and reporting on their performance;
  2. incorporated the performance framework into the Directorates-General (DGs’) 2014 management plans.

This approach is clearly laid down in the New Financial Regulation.

Lastly, the Commission recalls that the co-legislators were closely involved in the setting of the programme objectives and performance indicators.