The European Court of Auditors has warned that the European Commission’s proposals for the 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework risk making it more difficult to track how EU funds are spent and to detect irregularities, including potential corruption.
ECA President Tony Murphy told Politico key elements of the plan would amount to greater reliance on national systems in a form of “self-policing”.
“It’s more difficult for us to follow the money,” Murphy told Politico.
“You’re saying to the member state, here’s a whole lot of money, and you make sure everything is okay.”
He questioned the trade-off: “There will be some flexibility, but at what cost?”
The Commission’s approach would assign €865 billion of the proposed budget of almost €2 trillion over seven years to a single flexible pot that member states could direct towards objectives ranging from migration and agriculture to regional development.
The instrument would merge cohesion policy, the Common Agricultural Policy and home affairs funding, until now run through separate programmes, into one pot shared out through national and regional partnership plans.
Agriculture and cohesion funds have long been among the areas most vulnerable to error and misuse.
Greece’s parliament on Wednesday will vote on lifting the immunity of 13 lawmakers, a move demanded by European and Greek prosecutors investigating a multi-million EU farm scandal that is rocking the conservative government. https://t.co/HfX4gHp5M2
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) April 22, 2026
The ECA’s latest annual report, published on October 8, estimated that errors affected transactions worth around €6.7 billion in the previous year, contributing to an overall estimated error rate of 3.8 per cent in EU budget expenditure, up from 3.6 per cent the year before.
That rate applies to the €176.3 billion the Court audited, leaving out Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) grants. Errors in cohesion spending rose from 5.7 per cent to 6.6 per cent and in agriculture and environment from 2.6 per cent to 3.9 per cent.
The Court issued an adverse opinion on the regularity of spending for the seventh consecutive year, while the accounts themselves were certified as true and fair.
Errors measure non-compliance with rules rather than confirmed fraud, but the ECA has repeatedly found that national audit authorities do not always detect problems that later surface. Its auditors also reported 17 suspected cases of fraud.
Murphy’s head of cabinet, Wolfgang Stolz, added that year after year the work of these national authorities “is not fully reliable”.
Nine of the 37 RRF grant payments examined did not meet all the conditions attached to them and were paid out anyway, the report found.
With the proposed model, which draws on the RRF blueprint, it might become impossible even to produce comparable estimates of error rates, because national audit bodies operate under differing mandates and methods.
Under the current Common Agricultural Policy the European Court of Auditors can still carry out on-the-spot checks of individual farms that receive EU funds, giving a relatively direct view of how the money is used.
The Commission’s proposed national and regional partnership plans, modelled on the RRF, shift the emphasis towards performance-based payments to member states.
Under the RRF rules, public transparency is more limited: Each member state is required only to publish and update twice a year the list of its 100 largest final recipients.
More detailed information on contractors, subcontractors and beneficial owners is collected for audit and control purposes but is not systematically made public.
The Court of Auditors has noted that this makes it harder to follow the ultimate destination of the funds, particularly when public bodies appear as the formal recipients and the money then flows onward to private contractors.
“It’s not very transparent. I mean, where is the EU money actually ending up? That’s what matters,” Murphy said. “You have a fund where there are different policy areas with completely different objectives and timeframes, different delivery mechanisms and less predictability.”
The Commission has defended the proposals, stating that core control principles would remain and that it would retain the ability to require member states to amend plans or apply corrections.
Rule-of-law conditionality is also expected to continue.
Negotiations over the overall size of the post-2027 budget are continuing among member states, with the Irish presidency circulating a revised package on October 10 that would trim the Commission’s July 2025 proposal by about 8 per cent, or some €141 billion, to €1.62 trillion in 2025 prices.
Some net contributors, among them Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Finland, are pressing for substantial reductions relative to the Commission’s initial request. EU leaders take up the file at a European Council in Brussels on October 15-16.
The warning comes as the European Parliament on October 8 separately called for stronger anti-corruption measures in the next budget cycle, including reinforced rule-of-law conditionality, anti-corruption objectives written into EU-funded programmes and common indicators to measure what they achieve.
The ECA has previously cautioned that ambitious spending levels require equally ambitious safeguards if financing is to be linked more closely to results rather than detailed cost reimbursement. “Ambitious budgets demand equally ambitious safeguards,” Murphy said when presenting the report.
Errors in European Union spending have risen again in 2025, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) said on October 8, and the bloc’s debt is on course for €1 trillion. https://t.co/CnGJgXwlsk
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) October 8, 2026
