Minister for Finance Edward Scicluna said that the European Court of Auditors (ECA) shouldn’t be taken for granted, during a joint press conference with the President of the European Court of Auditors Klaus-Heiner Lehne .

Scicluna said that the European Court of Auditors is sometimes taken for granted, in the same way the Auditor General is in Malta, and “this shouldn’t be so,” he said. He said that the institution oversees all EU expenditure. “The Court has amassed a lot of information and it is always watchful.”

Scicluna said he found the experience of meeting and speaking with the Court very important.

For his part, Lehne said that the ECA wants to improve its products and strategy, referring to reforms in the ECA.

“We are trying to shift more into areas of performance.  Not only numbers but also result effectiveness and impact.” He spoke of an internal reform process and said that one cannot do such a thing without stakeholder support. He mentioned being in close cooperation with the EU Council.

Referring to the reform, he mentioned that if one receives EU funds, theoretically one can be audited a maximum of four times. “It’s not very likely, it’s like winning the lottery but theoretically can happen. We feel that it is necessary to have clear and constructive external audits leading to checking systems that are reliable but it doesn’t make too much sense to have too much of them. So it has to be little in the way that it is effective as well.”

He mentioned that there is a lot of trust in the ECA

The Malta Independent asked: “Every year, the ECA audits and looks into the way EU funds are used by EU countries. Has this process begun for the last year and if yes has anything been found regarding Malta’s spending of EU funds?”

In response he said that he cannot really say what has happened over the last year yet but stressed that the report won’t be published until the end of September. “But what we see overall is positive where over past years one can see there are improvements.  Not big steps. For that one would need to compare the 90s with the situation 20 years later.  Right now since we are reaching the margin of the so-called materiality level, the progress has become smaller. But there is a tendency you could see over the years the positive sector and it might be the court may take a decision to cover this aspect. I am quite careful at this point, it is still a work in process, I would say wait until the end of September till we publish the annual report.” Minister Scicluna then ended the press conference, however it remained unclear as to whether Lehne was referring to the EU as a whole or to Malta.