Members of the European Parliament’s budget committee have criticised the way that EU spending is checked, saying the focus should be on results and not just administrative procedures.

In its 2013 report [PDF] issued last week the European Court of Auditors, the EU’s official audit agency, found the payment “error rate” fell slightly from 4.8% in 2012 to 4.7% last year.

The figure represents the proportion of payments made against public spending rules due to administrative error, and not fraud. The EU’s target rate is 2%.

“Why do we only talk about error rates? Why don’t we examine what has been achieved with the funds in the past years?” German MEP Ingeborg Grässle said in a press statement issued Wednesday evening. “Roma integration and youth unemployment [were] two areas where money spent was not matched by results,” according to Grässle, who chairs the budgetary control committee and is part of the European People’s Party political bloc that includes European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.

According to the parliamentary committee, about 80% of EU funds are initially “managed and paid out locally by member states and their authorities” and member states are then reimbursed by EU institutions. But the committee noted that “the most error-prone areas” are those “managed by the member states themselves”: regional policy, with an error rate of 6.9% last year, and rural development, with an error rate of 6.7%.

“The audit trail of auditing must reach all the way down to programme level,” Finnish MEP Petri Sarvamaa, also of the EPP bloc, said in the same press statement.