Europese Rekenkamer: delegatie Commissietaken aan uitvoerende agentschappen kostbare aangelegenheid (en)

The European Court of Auditors has assessed whether the delegation of operational tasks to executive agencies has proved to be a successful instrument for implementing the EU budget.

Executive agencies are Community bodies established by the European Commission in order to implement, by delegation, EU spending programmes. They are a relatively recent phenomenon in the EU institutional landscape. Since 2003, six executive agencies have been created, responsible for managing a financial envelope of around 32 billion euro for the period till 2013.

The Court’s audit showed that the initiative of setting up the executive agencies was mainly driven by the need to compensate for staff shortages at the Commission rather than being part of a general reform of the governance based on the intrinsic features of the programmes themselves. The cost-benefit analyses accompanying the decisions to create the agencies took little account of non-financial aspects and omitted to consider some important factors on the side of costs. Their contribution to the decision-making process was therefore rather limited.

In terms of benefits achieved, clear cost savings stem from the prevalence of lower paid contract staff at the agencies, even when one considers the additional costs of the new posts created for supervision and support at both the Commission and the agencies. However, the savings very much depend on the redeployment of the Commission staff previously assigned to the programmes and on the suppression of the contract posts within the corresponding Commission services. In the absence of reliable information on the ex-ante situation at the Commission, the extent of the savings cannot be accurately quantified.

In terms of service delivery, the Court found that, as a result of their specialisation in well-defined tasks, the executive agencies are providing better service than the Commission did before. They conclude contracts, make payments and approve technical and financial reports on the projects more rapidly. In addition, they have simplified the management procedures and reduced the administrative burden for applicants and project promoters. Increased external communication and dissemination of results to a wider public are also contributing to enhance the visibility of EU actions. On the other hand, the process of recruiting adequate personnel has proved to be more difficult and less flexible than the Commission assumed.

The Court found that the Commission’s supervision of the agencies’ work is not fully effective. Generally, the executive agencies are not assigned results-oriented objectives and related targets. Monitoring, whilst making use of a large number of indicators, is focused on how the tasks are carried out rather than on the results produced. Reporting is usually limited to budgetary data and does not identify corrective actions for the future.