The Council approved the Council recommendations on the discharge to be given to the executive agencies in respect of the implementation of the budget for the 2017 financial year, namely:
Having examining the revenue and expenditure accounts for the financial year 2017 and the balance sheets of all the executive agencies and the Court of Auditors' report on the agencies' annual accounts, together with their respective replies, the Council recommended that the European Parliament give discharge to the director of each of the agencies concerned in respect of the implementation of their respective budgets for 2017.
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 as such call into question the granting of discharge.
In general, the Council encourages all agencies:
- to take appropriate measures, mainly to ensure the independence of the accounting officer in order to remedy the shortcomings identified by the Court in their accounting environment;
- to improve their public procurement and staff recruitment procedures and to ensure, without undue delay, the full implementation of an electronic public procurement system.
In particular, the Council invited the Executive Agency for Consumer Affairs, Health, Agriculture and Food:
- to take appropriate measures to ensure the legality and regularity of the recruitment process and the equal treatment of candidates;
- to continue improving its financial programming and monitoring of the budget implementation in order to reduce the unjustified level of commitments carried over and the amounts cancelled at the end of the following year to the strict minimum, in line with the budgetary principle of annuality.