STRASBOURG, France, June 8 (UPI) -- A European Parliament study released Wednesday said EU members should do more to recover some $1.2 billion in missing aid payments. The EU's anti-fraud agency, OLAF, has recovered less than 2 percent of an estimated $6.4 billion that disappeared between 1999 and 2003, according to report on budgetary control by Herbert Bosch, an EU parliament member from Austria.
Some members of the Parliament's Budget Committee fear the real level of misspending might be higher than has been indicated, the EU Observer reported. "Member states don't attach the same importance to protecting the EU's financial interests compared to their own," a parliamentary official said.
However, OLAF said its investigations take time because of their legal complexity. "OLAF is only five years old itself and this is just the beginning of the investigation process," the agency's spokesman, Allesandre Buttice, told EU Observer. "It is too early to measure us, you should measure us five years from now." | A five year plan, gee, that sounds familiar. Wonder how much money will be missing in another five years that they can't find? |
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