ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ 2: Synthesis 2009 multi-annual objectives

This Annex reports on the progress achieved in 2009 on the new and ongoing actions identified in the 2007 Synthesis Report to address major cross-cutting management issues. New actions introduced as a follow-up to the 2009 Synthesis report are indicated in bold italics.

(Initiatives stemming from previous years' Synthesis Reports, which were completed in 2008 or before, have been deleted from this table.)

Internal control systems and performance management
Subject	Objective	Initiative(s) to meet the objective	Responsible service(s) and timetable	Progress made in 2009
Internal control	1. Achieving an effective internal control system and ownership of internal control concepts and processes at all levels in each DG and service.	In October 2007 the Commission adopted a Communication revising the Internal Control Standards and underlying framework18, setting out 16 new internal control standards for effective management to replace the original set of 24 standards from 1 January 2008. Services may prioritise certain Standards with the aim of strengthening the basis of the annual declaration of assurance of the Directors-General. Furthermore the compliance reporting was simplified; moving from full reporting to exception based reporting on non-compliance.	DG BUDG for guidance and training, monitoring and reporting All Commission services for implementation Ongoing action	In 2009, the Commission adopted the Impact Report on the Commission Action Plan towards an Integrated Internal Control Framework19. It concluded that significant progress had been made in strengthening internal control systems during the mandate period of the previous Commission, and that there was enough evidence that progress was significantly accelerated by the launch of the Action Plan in 2006. Effective implementation of the Internal Control Framework will continue to be an objective of the Commission; however, as it is now an integral part of management in the Commission, it will be considered an ongoing action and no longer appear in this table as of the Synthesis Report 2010.
Annual activity reports and Synthesis	2. Promoting Commission’s accountability through annual activity reports and their synthesis solidly based on assurances from managers.	Assessment of critical success factors affecting the quality of AARs and take appropriate measures (training for staff involved in the preparation of AARs, further improvement of Standing Instructions).	DG BUDG and SG By September 2009 Done	In 2009 the Secretariat-General and the Directorate-General for Budget carried out a survey across the Commission, to identify the success factors influencing the quality of AARs. As a result, Standing Instructions for the AARs were subject to a major overhaul; a new, specific conclusion on the overall effectiveness of implementation of the Internal Control Standards is now required in part 2 of the AAR; a dedicated helpdesk was set up, training courses were offered, and an interactive presentation of the Standing Instructions was made available on the intranet, facilitating navigation and enabling services to find the answers to specific questions.
		To give the preparation of the AARs high priority, implementing the guidelines prepared by the central services.	All DGs By April 2010 Done	The Peer Review of AARs was further enhanced by early interventions by Central Services (pre-peer review) and systematic feedback to services on the quality of their draft AAR. The AARs 2009 show a noticeable improvement across the Commission, both in terms of the quality of the evidence presented in support of the assurance and in the readability of the reports.
Risk management	3. Establishing effective and comprehensive risk management making it possible to identify and deal with all major risks at service and Commission level and to lay down appropriate action to keep them under control, including disclosing resources needed to bring major risks to an acceptable level.	Implementation of the Action Plan agreed by SG and BUDG following the IAS audit of the implementation of the Commission's risk management framework will further improve the quality of risk management in the Commission, especially as regards the monitoring of follow-up of critical cross-cutting risks.	SG and BUDG By December 2010	The IAS audit of the implementation of the Commission's risk management framework, conducted in 2009, concluded that the risk management framework of the Commission is consistent with international standards and that it provides a solid basis to support risk management. The IAS identified some areas for improvement, mainly as regards the roles and responsibilities for risk management within DGs, a need for further guidelines and clarification on certain issues and the treatment of cross-cutting risks. These issues will be addressed by the central services in the course of 2010.
Residual risk	4. Taking further the concept of residual risk	Present to the discharge authorities concrete proposals for tolerable risk levels for the policy areas: Research, energy and transport and Rural development. Actively promote the idea of tolerable risk during the inter-Institutional discussions on the proposal for the revision of the Financial Regulation (FR)	DG BUDG together with concerned services By June 2010 DG BUDG with SG Ongoing for the process of reviewing the FR	The Commission has announced that it will continue to work on concrete proposals for tolerable risk levels for selected policy areas during 2010 as requested by the Discharge Authority.

Governance
Subject	Objective	Initiative(s) to meet the objective	Responsible service(s) and timetable	Progress made in 2009
Internal audit recommendations	5. Ensuring a smooth implementation of accepted internal audit recommendations	Effective follow-up of critical and very important recommendations of IAS recommendations should be regularly monitored at senior management level, and fully integrated into regular management planning, especially the annual management plans.	All services	Between March and December 2009 the Audit Progress Committee (APC) met five times and sent four information notes to the College. The APC notes that the level of acceptance of IAS recommendations remains high (close to 100%), and that the number of critical recommendations still open six months after the original delivery date was zero. There has also been a reduction in the number of IAS audits issued with an unsatisfactory opinion (4 in 2008 to3 in 2009). Nevertheless, the APC notes that follow-up of very important recommendations continued to be a challenge (68 remaining open six months after their due date), and that in 2009 there was an increase in the number of critical recommendations issued (from 0 in 2008 to 2 in 2009). The APC continued to hold DG accountable for the implementation of their own action plans; it sent reminders to Services wherever relevant. These reminders proved effective in strengthening follow-up. The APC also equipped itself with an APC Scoreboard to support its work.
Regulatory agencies	6. Clarifying the respective roles and responsibilities of Commission services and regulatory agencies.	The input of all institutions is necessary to negotiate a comprehensive framework, to clarify the respective responsibilities of the institutions and of the regulatory agencies. This framework would be applicable to the creation of future agencies and, at a later stage, to those already in existence.	All services concerned with the assistance of SG and DG BUDG. End 2009 Done	In a Communication of March 200820, the Commission announced a horizontal evaluation of the regulatory agencies by the end of 2009, a moratorium on creating new agencies and a review of its internal systems governing agencies. In January 2009 the Commission launched an independent horizontal evaluation of the system of regulatory agencies, as announced in its Communication of March 2008. The evaluation report, delivered in December 2009, concludes positively on several aspects of the agency system, such as their generally timely and adequate input to EU policies, coherence of the agencies' activities with the mandates and key policy priorities, synergies with actors in the same area and transparency vis-à-vis the general public. At the same time, it points at weaknesses of the agency system, including governance arrangements, and monitoring of agencies' performance. The conclusions of this evaluation are meant to feed into the ongoing inter-institutional dialogue on agencies launched in March 2009. As a follow-up to the above mentioned Communication, the Commission also issued several guideline documents with a view to optimising its relations with agencies: a tentative roadmap for setting up new agencies; guidelines for concluding memoranda of understanding between agencies and the Commission; and mapping of the assistance delivered to agencies by Commission services.
Reservations	7. Ensuring strong follow-up of action plans related to the expressed reservations, notably for the progress to be made in 2009.	Directors-General will report on progress to the respective Commissioner in the context of the regular follow-up meetings on audit and control. The ABM Steering Group will closely monitor and regularly report to the College on the implementation of the remedial actions that delegated authorising officers have committed to carry out in their annual activity reports.	SG and DG BUDG for monitoring and coordinating reporting DGs concerned for implementation Continuous action	For all reservations, delegated authorising officers have laid down appropriate action plans to solve the underlying weaknesses. They monitored the implementation of action plans and reported to the Commissioner responsible. The implementation of all action plans has also been monitored by the ABM Steering Group which invited Directors-General to report regularly to the Group on the state of play of their action plans. An outcome of the review of the Standing Instructions for AARs is that two distinct parts of the report now build the argumentation towards the assurance. Part 2 deals with internal control in general and part 3 contains the building blocks towards the assurance on financial management. The AAR must include a conclusion drawn by the Authorising Officer by Delegation (AOD) on the basis of all evidence presented in part 3.
		Closely follow-up the delays in the implementation of the Schengen Information System II and the VIS system. Financial risk corresponding to the residual error rate in the non-audited population of grants in the programmes under ABB activity 1804 – Fundamental rights and citizenship	JLS, SG – by end 2010	The issue continued to be the subject of a reservation in the AAR 2009 of DG JLS. The two issues are being closely monitored by the Commission. Progress made in 2009 concerns the increased rate of projects audited in the population at risk and improvements in the procedures for direct management of grants. For a detailed list of actions to be implemented, please consult DG JLS's AAR 2009 on Europa (http://ec.europa.eu/atwork/synthesis/aar/index_en.htm)

Financial management
Subject	Objective	Initiative(s) to meet the objective	Responsible service(s) and timetable	Progress made in 2008
Integrated internal control framework	8. Enhancing accountability by establishing a comprehensive integrated internal control framework in line with the requirements set out in the ECA’s opinions on ‘single audit’.	Reinforce the accountability of Member States for the use of EU funds by revising the guidelines for the annual summaries to draw on the lessons learned, and continue offering support to the Member States	AGRI, EMPL, MARE, REGIO, JLS By July 2010	The Directorates-General involved in shared management of EU funds have continued their efforts at coordination, including by developing and implementing joint audit strategies. As part of their work they have continued to analyze annual summaries submitted by Member States, updating the guidance and holding regular meetings with competent authorities.
Accounts	9. Increasing responsibility and accountability at the level of the Commission as a whole by the signing-off of the accounts by the Accounting Officer and by improved quality of financial information.	The Commission will further strengthen its accounting processes and systems to improve the quality of the financial information and the respect of deadlines.	All services, continuous action with the assistance of the services of the Accounting Officer Continuous action	The European Court of Auditors expressed in 2009 for the second time an unqualified opinion on the 2008 accounting data of the Commission. The accounting quality project continued in 2009. Services identified their main accounting risks and set up detailed action plans to address these as part of their annual accounting control programmes. The Accountant's report on the validation of local systems for 2009 confirmed that these in general are steadily improving. Most local systems have been validated but further improvements are needed in DGs JLS and RELEX, whose systems have not yet been fully validated, although progress on outstanding issues is being recorded. The average payment time has fallen significantly; from 34 days in 2008 to 26 days in 2009.

ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ 3: Executive and Regulatory Agencies

In line with practice in most Member States, using agencies to implement key tasks has become an established part of the way the European Union works.

Six executive agencies exist:

• 
  the Executive Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (EACI – formerly known as IEEA);
  
• 
  the Executive Agency for Health and Consumers (EAHC – formerly known as PHEA);
  
• 
  the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA);
  
• 
  the European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA);
  
• 
  the Research Executive Agency (REA);
  
• 
  the Trans-European Transport Network Executive Agency (TEN-TEA).
  

The breakdown of staff employed at 31/12/2009 by the executive agencies was as follows:

	Temporary agents (officials seconded by the Commission and agents recruited by the agency)	Contractual agents	Seconded national experts	Total
EACI	28	113	0	141
EAHC	11	37	0	48
EACEA	91	304	0	395
ERCEA	93	162	7	262
REA	72	238	0	310
TEN-TEA	31	60	0	91
Total	326	914	7	1247

A 2009 special report²⁴ by the European Court of Auditors examined the executive agencies. The report concludes that agencies provide better service delivery than the Commission (reduced contracting time, more rapid approval procedures, shorter payment times) and also offer the advantages of simplified processes and increased external visibility for EU actions. Less positively, it suggests that, despite these achievements the initiative to set up the executive agencies was mainly driven by constraints on employment within the Commission and the will to save costs for the management of the programmes concerned. The report confirms that externalisation to Executive Agencies has effectively resulted in cost savings, which, however, are difficult to quantify due to a lack of reliable data for the ex-ante situation.

The 30 regulatory agencies are independent legal entities. 25 of these agencies receive funds from the European Union budget and are therefore granted discharge by the European Parliament in individual discharge decisions. The remaining five agencies do not receive EU funding and thus do not receive discharge by the European Parliament (two of these agencies²⁵ are fully self-financed, and three²⁶ are funded on an intergovernmental basis and financed directly by the participating Member States).

In a Communication of March 2008 entitled "EU agencies: the way forward"²⁷ the Commission drew attention to the lack of a common vision on the role and functioning of regulatory agencies. It announced a moratorium on creating new agencies and a horizontal evaluation of regulatory agencies.

The evaluation was finalised in December 2009. It reported that there is no single legal framework governing the establishment and closure of EU de-centralised agencies, and that alternatives to creating agencies were paid limited attention until impact assessments came into practice. Furthermore, a number of chosen location sites for the agencies were assessed as inefficient. As regards agencies' effectiveness, the report concluded that the activities of the majority of agencies are coherent with their mandate, and that in general there was clear evidence that agencies have achieved the planned outputs. The evaluation further considered that in order to operate efficiently with regards to the administrative tasks, an agency needs to reach a certain critical size, somewhere between 50 and 100 staff. Finally, it was found that monitoring was not very well developed in terms of the use of quantifiable objectives and indicators.

The 2008 Communication also proposed to establish an inter-institutional working group to set ground rules to apply to all regulatory agencies. The inter-institutional Working Group was set up in March 2009 between the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the Commission with a view to assessing the existing situation and in particular the coherence, effectiveness, accountability and transparency of these Agencies, and finding a common ground on how to improve their work. The group was called to address a number of key issues put forward by the participating Institutions, including the role and position of the agencies in the EU's institutional landscape, their creation, structure and operation, as well as funding, budgetary, supervision and management issues.

Further to the kick-off meeting at political level held in Strasbourg on 10 March 2009, technical work started in spring 2009 and will continue during 2010. The reports produced so far are expected to be endorsed by the political meeting in 2010.

In March 2010, the European Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control²⁸ adopted a decision to grant all agencies discharge for 2008, with the exception of the European Police College (CEPOL) whose discharge decision was postponed.

CEPOL's 2008 accounts received a qualified opinion in 2009 from the European Court of Auditors, for the second year. The DG responsible for the grant contribution to CEPOL's running costs (DG JLS) reported that the situation of CEPOL in 2009, where only 43.6 % of the payment appropriations were used due to an unstable organisational environment, required particular attention. In accordance with the applicable financial regulations and with a view to obtain a better estimate of the cash requirements, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed in 2009 between DG JLS and CEPOL. New management took up posts in CEPOL during 2009, with a view to address the situation. Nevertheless, considering the residual risks while awaiting that the new arrangements would become effective, JLS maintained CEPOL as a "reputational event" in its 2009 AAR.

ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ 4: Report on negotiated procedures 2009