2010 discharge: European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA)

PURPOSE: presentation of the EU Court of Auditors’ report on the annual accounts of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), together with the Agency’s.

CONTENT: in accordance with the tasks conferred on the Court of Auditors by the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the Court presents to the European Parliament and to the Council, in the context of the discharge procedure, a Statement of Assurance as to the reliability of the annual accounts of each institution, body or agency of the EU, and the legality and regularity of the transactions underlying them, on the basis of an independent external audit.

This audit concerned, amongst others, the annual accounts of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).

In the Court’s opinion, the Agency’s Annual Accounts fairly present, in all material respects, its financial position as of 31 December 2010 and the results of its operations and its cash flows for the year then ended, in accordance with the provisions of its Financial Regulation.

It considers that the transactions underlying the annual accounts of the Agency are, in all material respects, legal and regular.

The report confirms that the Agency’s final 2010 budget was EUR 8.1 million and that the number of staff employed by the Agency at the end of the year was 53.

The report also makes a series of observations on the budgetary and financial management of the Agency, accompanied by the latter’s response. The main observations may be summarised as follows:

The Court’s observations:

• budgetary and financial management: in 2010, 52% of the Agency’s operational budget was committed but not spent. For the Court, this level of carry-over is excessive and at odds with the budgetary principle of annuality;
• recruitment: with regard to staff selection procedures, neither the thresholds that candidates had to meet in order to be invited to interview nor those necessary for them to be put on the reserve list were fixed in advance. They were set by the selection board after the evaluation of the candidates. According to the Court, these practices put at risk the transparency of the recruitment procedures.

Lastly, the Court of Auditors’ report contains a summary of the Agency’s activities in 2010. This is focused in particular on 3 Multiannual thematic programme (MTP) and 2 Preparatory Action (PA):

• MTP 1: improving resilience in European electronic communication network;
• MTP 2: developing and maintaining co-operation between Member States (including international cooperation opportunities which were explored with the aim of improving the capabilities of all Members States and increasing the overall coherence of the approach to NIS at the pan-European level);
• MTP 3: identifying emerging risks for creating trust and confidence.
• PA 1: identity, accountability and trust in the future Internet: the overall goal of this Preparatory Action was to ‘ensure that Europe maintains a high level of security and confidence of both users and industry on the electronic communication infrastructure and provided services, while at the same time limiting the threats to civil liberties and privacy’;
• PA 2: identifying drivers and frameworks for EU sectoral NIS Cooperation: the purpose of this PA was to clarify the question of how to get commitments from relevant actors to collective action to address NIS challenges at a pan-European level.