Grybauskaite defeat over ‘one-language accounts’

By Tim King

Date: 04/05/05

The Budget Commissioner, Dalia Grybauskaite has dropped a suggestion that the European Commission should only be required to publish its full accounts in just one language, following protests from her fellow commissioners.

At a meeting of chefs de cabinet, the representatives from the office of Frenchman Jacques Barrot, Italian Franco Frattini, Spaniard Joaquín Almunia and Belgian Louis Michel, led the protests against the proposal.

Grybauskaite had suggested that "to save costs and time, the Commission should be able to publish the consolidated annual accounts and the report on budgetary and financial management of each institution in only one language".

Currently the accounts are published in the 11 languages of the old member states. But instead of a reduction in languages, Grybauskaite was forced to accept a change to her proposal, which will now suggest translation into all 20 languages of the enlarged EU.

The proposal published yesterday (3 May) by the Commission has to win the approval of the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers but will, the Commission hopes, be in place by January 2007.

In some respects, the Commission is intending to relax the spending rules. The ceiling for grants to be treated as lump sum payments would be raised from €5,000 to €10,000. The amount of supporting information required to justify these grants would be reduced. The Commission also wants to reduce the paperwork for small- and medium-sized enterprises that hold contracts with the Commission.

An existing ban on delegating budget implementation tasks to private bodies would be modified under the proposal because, the Commission argues, it is "unnecessarily strict".

Article reports that the European Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget, Dalia Grybauskaite, dropped a suggestion that the European Commission should only be required to publish its full accounts in just one language, following protests from her fellow Commissioners.

The European Commission on 3 May 2005 proposed a revised Financial Regulation. The changes were aimed at significantly simplifying financial procedures, improving efficiency and transparency in EU spending. New rules were expected to be in place by 2007, in time to allow the smooth functioning of a new generation of EU-funded programmes.

European Commission: Press Release: IP/05/520, Simplified rules for better financial management http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/05/520&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

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