In accordance with Council Regulation (EC) No 58/2003 laying down the statute for executive agencies to be entrusted with certain tasks in the management of Community programmes, and in particular Article 14(3) thereof, and Commission Regulation (EC) No 1653/2004 on a standard financial regulation for the executive agencies, the Council is required to draw up recommendations to the European Parliament on a discharge to be given to the executive agencies.
At its meetings on 16 and 30 January, and 8 February 2018, the Budget Committee examined the six specific annual reports of the European Court of Auditors related to executive agencies. Having examined the revenue and expenditure accounts for the financial year 2016 and the balance sheets of all the executive agencies as well as the Court of Auditors' report on the annual accounts of the agencies together with their respective replies, the Council considered it appropriate to recommend to the European Parliament to give discharge to the Directors of each agency as regards the implementation of their respective budgets for 2016.
However, it considered that the observations contained in the Court of Auditors' report called for a number of comments from the Council which do not call into question the granting of discharge.
The Council called on all the executive agencies to improve their financial programming and monitoring of the budget implementation in order to reduce the level of committed appropriations carried over to the following financial year to the minimum strictly necessary, in line with the budgetary principle of annuality.