The members of the Contact Committee Working Group on Structural Funds conducted a parallel audit on Costs and Benefits of Structural Funds Controls, whose objective was to assess the costs generated by internal control activities of the Member States. Last October, the Contact Committee adopted the Working Group’s audit report.
During this audit, auditors from twelve European SAIs examined the costs of control activities performed by the Member States in the years 2007-2009 for Structural Funds, within the 2007-2013 programming period. Each SAI that was engaged in the audit was tasked with examining at least one operational programme.
On the basis of national audits, it was established that varying costs of control activities could be attributed to different solutions used by the Member States as for the organisation of the systems for Structural Funds implementation. In 2007, the costs of control activities were the lowest and have been increasing systematically since then. In some cases, financial benefits have been obtained. Still, auditors emphasise that controls also bring benefits other than financial.
Costs were assessed with the use of two methods: cost-centre accounting and cost-unit accounting. The cost-centre accounting method relies on calculating costs on the basis of the budget of an institution’s organisational unit and the number of employees responsible for a given control activity in relation to the total number of employees. The other method - cost-unit accounting - consists in calculating costs of each individual control activity performed by a given institution.
