Limitations in the monitoring and evaluation of emergency programmes

Subject: Limitations in the monitoring and evaluation of emergency programmes

On 14 December 2022, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) published its special report 28/2022: Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency (SURE). In the report, the ECA criticised the Commission’s inability to monitor and evaluate the actual impact of the programme.

1. How does the Commission plan to improve the monitoring and evaluation of similar emergency instruments in the future (for example it agreed with the ECA that some monitoring data was based on estimates or not comprehensive and therefore limited the monitoring of results)?

2. Given the reputational risk for the EU if measures financially supported by the EU budget are perceived as being prone to fraud (as stated in the Commission’s response to the report), what has the Commission done itself to mitigate the risk of fraud and irregularities in this programme, other than hope that the Member States find these?

3. How exactly is the Commission planning to evaluate the SURE programme, as proposed in the ECA’s recommendation, which the Commission has already accepted?

Submitted: 9.1.2023

Answer given by Mr Gentiloni on behalf of the European Commission

(2 March 2023)

The Special Report by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) is overall very positive on the Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency (SURE) instrument. It makes one recommendation, namely to evaluate SURE.

The results of the evaluation study will provide an opportunity to draw lessons for similar emergency instruments in the future. The Commission has already shown the positive impact of SURE in its bi-annual reporting, whereby around 31.5 million people and 2.5 million firms were supported by SURE (1).

The Commission has controls in place to prevent irregularities or fraud with respect to the reporting of data by Member States, either when requesting a loan or subsequently on the use of a loan.

Should any cases raise suspicion, the Commission can conduct investigations. The Commission undertakes this task in full respect of the competencies of the Member States and does not have a mandate to assess and monitor the use of SURE loans by final recipients in the Member States.

This is the responsibility of Member States as explicitly provided for by SURE Regulation (2). To ensure that Member States respect their legal obligations, the Commission carried out in early 2022 a survey on national audits and controls and reported on the results in the third bi-annual report on SURE (3). The Commission will follow up on the survey in the forthcoming fifth bi-annual report on SURE.

The Commission is required, under the Financial Regulation (4), to carry out an evaluation study for all EU support above EUR 5 million, including SURE.

The evaluation study on SURE will be completed by the third quarter 2024, as recommended by the ECA. The evaluation will follow the Commission Better Regulation guidelines (5), while duly addressing the ECA recommendation.

1 ∙ ⸱ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52022DC0483

2 ∙ ⸱ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32020R0672&from=en

3 ∙ ⸱ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52022DC0128

4 ∙ ⸱ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32018R1046

5 ∙ ⸱ https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/planning-and-proposing-law/better-regulation/better-regulation-guidelines-and-toolbox_en#:~:text=The

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