Budgetary discipline

The Court of Auditors has delivered its Opinion on the proposed Regulation to repeal Council Regulation (EC) No 2040/2000 on budgetary discipline. The following observations have been made by the Court:

• it has not had an opportunity to comment on budgetary discipline and sound financial management issues in cases where they are arranged by inter-institutional agreements instead of Council Regulations;
• as from 1 January 2007 Regulation (EC) No 2040/2000 will become obsolete and should, therefore, be repealed to enable the new Inter-insitutional Agreement to be fully applied as from this date;
• the proposed mechanism for provisioning the Guarantee Fund for external actions is yet to find a new legal basis.