The European Court of Auditors gives green light to Joint Undertakings

The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has given the green light to all the accounts of the EU’s Joint Undertakings (JU) that it examined this year. The auditors confirm the positive results of previous audits, but also warn that some rough waters lie ahead. They emphasise the need to wrap up projects from the prior funding cycle, bring private members’ contributions up to the agreed targets, and address some recruitment and management shortcomings.

Although the auditors have given all the JUs a clean bill of health, they expressed concern about the impact that managing multiple overlapping projects could have on staff and on project results. They point to several JUs that have carried projects over from the previous to the current budget cycle, and urge them to wrap up such legacy projects as soon as possible:

The ECA also raised the issue of contributions from the private sector. These contributions sometimes fall short of expectations. For example, the Joint Undertakings for a Circular Bio-based Europe (CBE) and for European High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) have not met their targets for in-kind contributions from private members. In the case of EuroHPC, the auditors found that the private members had only provided 2.6% of their minimum contribution target for Horizon 2020 projects by the end of 2022.

The report can be downloaded here:

Annual report on EU Joint Undertakings for the financial year 2022 (europa.eu)