Mr. Andrew Munro:

Some of the arguments advanced by the Commission and some of the things that have been discussed in the Council working group touch on the point raised by the Senator. One argument I have heard is that perhaps more can be done in terms of preventing fraud. It is a truism to say that any system in place can be tweaked to improve it and make it work better. Much effort goes in at national level. For example, in terms of the biggest volume of payments in the agricultural sector, of the order of 23,000 inspections or checks are conducted annually on the system within Ireland alone. Therefore, much work is done on the preventative side and at administrative level.

I could not comment specifically on whether there is scope for more and better co-operation between OLAF and Eurojust. My guess is that every system could, perhaps, be tweaked to work better. The suggestion has been made that when cases go through the administrative process in OLAF, OLAF finds there is a criminal issue at stake and it is referred back, the Commission's position is that the level of success in terms of prosecutions in member states following on from that is not what it should be. If we look at the figures, not specifically relating to fraud against the interests of the EU, from the Director of Public Prosecution's report for last year for fraud cases finalised, we find that the success rate in terms of cases that were prosecuted was 100% last year, with 19 cases resulting in conviction. I believe it was 95% the previous year. It is a very high number of cases when there is a decision to prosecute and they go ahead. It is difficult to draw a particular conclusion because we do not have any set of figures broken down between EU fraud and other types of fraud. Certainly at the discussion at member state level one will hear other member states maintaining that their systems are effective and that they are successfully challenging these issues. I agree that more co-ordination between member states might be helpful but whether the proposed model needs to go that far is the focus of the discussion to some extent and also how much centralisation and harmonisation is needed on this measure.