1993 discharge: follow-up. Report

The European Parliament adopted a resolution granting the Commission discharge for the implementation of the budget of the Communities for the 1993 financial year with respect to sections I (Parliament), II (Council), III (Commission), IV (Court of Justice) and V (Court of Auditors) but acknowledged that the EAGGF expenditure reported by Member States was still awaiting a final audit and that certain amounts might be corrected. Parliament therefore reserved the right to re-examine expenditure under the guarantee section of the EAGGF once it had received the clearance of the accounts for the 1993 financial year and was in a position to supplement the present discharge decision. At the same time, Parliament set out a number of observations in a resolution annexed to its decision: - general observations: the European Parliament called on the Commission and the Court of Auditors to provide it, by 15 November each year, with information on the budgetary headings on which Parliament had amended the comments and the new headings created by the European Parliament. It also called on the Commission to implement these budget items without delay and deplored the fact that it had not taken account of all its comments on a number of specific budget lines. Parliament also deplored the role played by the Council with regard to milk quotas and wine, where decisions had been taken which disregarded market needs and taxpayers' interests; - own resources: Parliament deplored the fact that the implementation of the single market had not been accompanied by greater harmonization of fraud control and therefore called on the Commission to propose measures to harmonize and facilitate customs controls. It made a point of asking the Commission to inform it of fraud committed under the Community transit procedure and to make every effort to computerize the procedure; - agricultural expenditure: the European Parliament deplored the under-utilization of appropriations for joint funding of national controls and measures to combat fraud in the EAGGF sector. At the same time, it called on the Commission to report to it on the implementation of the COM in the raw tobacco sector and deplored the fact that the viticultural land register would not be operational in all countries until 1997. It called on the Commission to strengthen its services so as to ensure the uniform application of viticultural regulations; - Structural Funds: the European Parliament felt that the implementation of structural policies was still causing problems and called for a series of measures to remedy this (provision for a typology of projects and eligible expenditure in operational programmes, provision for specific powers for monitoring committees, introduction of imprescriptible deadlines for payments of advances and balances etc.). It also called for on-site controls by the Commission to be stepped up; - research and internal policies: with regard to research, the European Parliament called for action to coordinate national and Community policies to be stepped up in order to create synergisms; - TACIS and PHARE: the European Parliament called on the Commission to give priority to investment projects involving the EIB and projects to help local banks play a more important role in granting loans to local SMEs. It also called for more decentralized management of TACIS and for the Commission to coordinate more efficiently with other agencies funding PHARE and TACIS.