By 19 votes in favour to six against, the Budgetary Control Committee recommended on Wednesday that Parliament grants discharge to the Commission’s 2021 budget. In the same voting session, they signed off the accounts of European Development Fund and 33 EU agencies (click here for vote results).

Vulnerability to misuse and fraud

In the resolution accompanying the discharge decision (adopted by 19 votes in favour, 3 against and 3 abstentions), MEPs say that since the recovery and resilience funds (RRF) have been set up “under time pressure”, control requirements are much lighter than those in place for cohesion and agriculture funds.

MEPs also stress that for the recovery funds member states bear greater responsibility to protect the EU’s financial interests when compared to cohesion or agricultural programmes, while some national authorities’ control systems are “too error-prone and unreliable”, uneven in quality or too complex, and may attract misuse, fraud and…