Of 23 payments from the union's recovery fund, six contained significant errors. And the EU budget's debt has almost doubled in two years, from 236 to 458 billion euros between 2021 and 2023.
"We have now reached halfway through the budget period 2021-2027 and the observations in our annual report highlight the main challenges for the EU budget, such as high levels of incorrect costs," says the Court of Auditors' President Tony Murphy in a press release.
Noting something as incorrect does not necessarily mean it involves fraud, deceit, or waste, but rather that rules have not been followed for the use.
The error rate for expenditures was on average 5.6 percent in 2023 in a budget that amounted to 191 billion euros – an increase from both 2022 and 2021.
The error rate is higher in the part concerning measures to reduce disparities and support more equal conditions within the EU, cohesion. There, it was 9.3 percent, up more than three percentage points.
The auditors believe that some of the errors may be due to time pressure when member states apply for funds, in order to be able to receive them at all.
