Mr. Tony Murphy:

If I go back to Deputy Richmond's questions, as far as I know, it is 80% pre-financing. This was one of the benefits for the member states. Getting 80% pre-financing is unheralded. It is basically giving countries most of the money upfront in order that they can address the urgent issues straightaway. In terms of reporting, this is one of the issues we raised. As the first claim member states will make to the Commission will not be made until September 2023, the first time we actually get the related claims in will be 2023. As for whether we will audit on a member state basis, the answer is "No". We do a sample of payments across the whole budget area. The BAR will be just one more element of that. While it is a lot of money, it is €5 billion in terms of €160 billion in expenditure. It is very important, particularly so for Ireland because we are getting around €1 billion in the first tranche. That is more or less it in terms of the BAR.

On the NGEU, obviously these plans are being assessed by the Commission and are basically being approved. What we have seen in the sample we looked at is that milestones could be something like a particular law being passed or reforms in specific labour areas. This is where we would have a difficulty. It would be easy to audit them because if the law is implemented, it is implemented and it is fine. As for targets, a hospital in Spain, for instance, has stated it will create 60,000 places in residential homes for elderly people, so that is a target. They are not linked to costs at all, which is the big issue for us. In a way, they are easy to audit from a purely compliance point of view because they can show us that the target has been met. Our issue then, however, is whether it has been met using EU funds in the best possible way and with the NGEU, it is not clear. Are they national funds once they leave the Commission or are they still EU funds? We are looking at the strategy. It is very complicated and is a real challenge for us.

On the point on Irish people, I thank the Deputy. As he is aware, I am constantly trying to promote the EU to the Irish people. We were visiting universities and were doing everything we could until the pandemic stopped us in our tracks. We try to sell the European project and not just the Court of Auditors because the Court of Auditors is a small institution in the overall scheme of things. In particular, it is of vital importance that we get Irish people into the Commission in particular where, basically, policies are shaped. We follow the strategy for EU jobs, which was announced a couple of weeks ago by the Minister of State, Deputy Byrne. We are constantly working on this and have been quite successful. The easiest way to get people in is through a traineeship, which gives them an opportunity to see if they are really interested. That is a good opportunity. In 2019, before the pandemic, we were doing quite well. We had seven trainees here out of a total of about 55 for the whole court. Only Germany had eight so we were quite successful and we hope to continue that when things pick up again. There were still five for 2020 so it is still not bad given the circumstances. They are virtual traineeships, which do not really give the trainees the same insight into working in an EU institution and whether they would like to do that or invest in language skills if needed to do that. On a positive note, we have been successful and have three detached national experts who will start in the court in September. We have been pushing that a lot here. Only 12 are being taken on by the court and we have been successful, in that three are Irish. The big opportunities for Irish people in the institutions involve the Irish language. There are a lot of opportunities in that sphere. The problem the institutions have is that they are all chasing the same people. They have derogations to extend the period and are now at the end of it so they must start getting people in. We have one temporary agent who will start here around September also. We are quite happy that we will have a mini-influx of Irish people into this institution because there are only about 15 or 16 Irish people here, so four coming in even if it is only on a temporary basis is still quite significant. We will try to keep working on that.

Regarding questions about the error and whether it is significant, that is all relative. It is a matter of opinion. Our threshold is 2.7%, which does not seem like a lot. In terms of money, to put it into perspective we are talking about €3.4 billion out of the budget. What I said earlier was that we consider 53% of our policy areas to be high-risk expenditure mainly because they are cost reimbursement. As we have an error rate of 4.9% there, it is quite far away from 2%. Where we have fewer errors is in places like natural resources because direct payments are entitlement-based. You have an area of land and are entitled to X amount. It is far less prone to risk. Obviously, there are other issues - perhaps not so much in Ireland - with direct payments in some member states but that is another issue. Perhaps that is the link to what the Chairman asked about CAP and fraud. That is an ongoing report that will not be issued until next year. There we are looking at things like land grabbing in some member states. It is a bigger issue in some member states than others.

Regarding whether we always look after the facts, auditors tend to come after the event, that is, after the horse has bolted, if you want to put it like that. Regarding the BAR and the NGEU, because of the set-up in the EU institutions, we are often asked to give an opinion so we have a chance. It does not mean that they will take on board what we ask for or what we raise but at least, we have the opportunity to contribute to the process. If things materialise afterwards that we already had warned about, we can say "we told you so.", so there is a role there.

Regarding loans, I used to work at the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, DG ECFIN, which at that time was the only treasury loan and borrowing functioning in the Commission. It will oversee this significant lending activity for the NGEU. It has just started. I think it was on the market yesterday or the day before. We will have an audit of debt management by the Commission, which will start quite soon. As these audits take some time because of the procedure, it will be late next year before that is finalised.

On INTERREG, we are auditors and we look at the whole budget. I understand that INTERREG is important in Ireland but in respect of materiality, the Deputy mentioned €18 million, which, in the overall scheme of things, is not a big part of the EU budget. On Government interactions, we are auditors and we are not driving policy. We are purely coming along after the legislation and budgetary decisions have been made to make sure that they are implemented in line with the decisions which were taken.