2014 discharge: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)

The Committee on Budgetary Control adopted the report by Derek VAUGHAN (S&D, UK) on discharge in respect of the implementation of the budget of the European Centre for disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) for the financial year 2014.

The parliamentary committee calls on the European Parliament to grant the Executive Director of the Centre discharge in respect of the implementation of the agency’s budget for the financial year 2014.

Noting that the Court of Auditors issued a statement of assurance as to the reliability of the accounts and the legality and regularity of the underlying transactions for the financial year 2014, Members call on Parliament to approve the closure of the Centre’s accounts. They made, however, a number of recommendations that needed to be taken into account when the discharge is granted, in addition to the general recommendations that appear in the draft resolution on performance, financial management and control of EU agencies:

·         Centre’s financial statements: Members note that the final budget of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control for the financial year 2014 was EUR 60 486 000, representing an increase of 3.72 % compared to 2013.

·         Budget and financial management: Members note that the budget monitoring efforts during the financial year 2014 resulted in a high budget implementation rate of 98.77 %, representing an increase of 5.81 % compared to the previous year.

Members also made a series of observations regarding commitments and carryovers, contract award, recruitment and internal audit and control procedures.

Members note that the development and launch of the Surveillance Atlas of Infectious Diseases on the Centre’s web portal publishes Union level data together with some international data. . They also acknowledge that all reports edited and published by the Centre were made available as downloadable documents on the Centre’s web portal.

Lastly, they recall that, as an EU Agency, the Centre has a budget denominated in euro, but has a lot of expenses in another currency (Swedish crown (SEK)) as it is based in a non-Eurozone country. They note that in early 2014, the Centre had to implement a revised EUR to SEK exchange rate and adjust upwards the cost in EUR of expenses in SEK going back to 2011, leading to several revisions of its work programme. They welcome that, despite this, by the end of the year 2014, the Centre had delivered nearly 85 % of the deliverables planned in its work programme for 2014, as well as delivering 117 emergency outputs on the major disease control emergency of 2014, namely, the unprecedented Ebola epidemic that emerged in West Africa and subsequently evolved into a global concern.