Fight Against Fraud in the EU Funds - Tools Used in European Funds Spending – Part II

ABSTRACT

Fight Against Fraud in the EU Funds – Tools Used in European Funds Spending – Part II

In the next years, Member States will be spending funds from the EU’s largest package ever. It comprises money from the multi-annual financial perspective (2021–2027) and the reconstruction plan – designed to mitigate the crisis and provide the basis for developing modern and sustainable Europe. It will be a great challenge to eliminate fraud in the funds spending. However, it seems feasible to reduce fraud because over the last years EU institutions have made fraud combating their priority. The second part of the article related to the protection of EU financial interests focuses on measures and good practices examples that may significantly contribute to counteracting corruption, understood in a broad sense. It describes tools that are applied mainly by the institutions responsible for EU funds implementation aimed at identifying fraud, including a mechanism for anonymous reporting on irregularities (in the context of the Whistleblower Directive). The author discusses potential instruments developed in response to the most frequent irregularities areas, i.e. breaches in public procurement, conflicts of interests, or collusive tendering. An innovative instrument, designated for social control of public funds spending – the so called integrity pact – has been discussed in more detail. The author also presents IT tools to increase public spending transparency and to identify suspicious transactions.

Key words: fraud, EU funds, management control, fraud detection, integrity pact, IT tools, bid rigging