Archive photo: Baudilio Tomé Muguruza, Spain’s member of the European Court of Auditors, speaks at a press conference in Brussels on 21 May 2014. Tomé Muguruza oversaw the 2016 audit of Euratom, the European nuclear power agency based in Luxembourg, which was released on 10 October 2017. European Commission

Archive photo: Baudilio Tomé Muguruza, Spain’s member of the European Court of Auditors, speaks at a press conference in Brussels on 21 May 2014. Tomé Muguruza oversaw the 2016 audit of Euratom, the European nuclear power agency based in Luxembourg, which was released on 10 October 2017. European Commission

The European Court of Auditors checks that European funds are spent in line with EU rules. It was chartered with auditing the books of 41 European institutions and eight “joint undertakings and European schools”.

On 10 October, the ECA said in a news announcement that:

“The auditors concluded that the final 2016 accounts of all nine agencies, comprising the financial statements and the reports on the implementation of the budget, were based on international public-sector accounting standards and presented fairly, in all material respects, their financial standing at the end of 2016, the results of their operations, cash flows and changes in net assets for the year. They also concluded that the transactions related to their annual accounts for 2016, both revenue and payments, complied with the relevant rules in all material respects.”

Reports were issued on Tuesday for these 9 entities: 

Annual audit reports for the remaining EU outfits are expected to be released in mid-November.

Irregular spending across the entire EU budget dropped from 3.8% of payments in 2015 to 3.1% in 2016, the ECA said on 27 September.

The ECA is based in Kirchberg and employs around 900 staff members.