Ms Emily O'Reilly:

It could be anything. Someone may have written to the Commission and it did not write back or, to give an example, let us say an Irish person got a contract or grant to do a particular job and the Commission identified a problem and was looking for its money back or refusing to provide the next tranche of money. That person could come and complain to us and we would have access to whatever documents we would need for research in our investigation. We would look very carefully through the file and if we discovered that the Commission had made a mistake or had not taken into account force majeure, we would make a recommendation accordingly. That happens quite often given the sheer number of people who get contracts and grants from the Commission, as members can imagine.

Another interesting case in that broad administrative area concerns EPSO, the European Personnel Selection Office. It has one job which is to hold competitions for administrators and assistants in the EU. Thousands of mainly younger people apply to EPSO and the process includes very tough exams and so on. During Covid and for a little while afterwards, EPSO decided that instead of bringing people to its standard external examination centres, it would have people do these tests online at home on their computers. This led to terrible stress for a lot of people whose computers would not work properly or who did not have the correct space to do the test in. All sorts of issues were raised. Basically, it seems that EPSO fell in love with the technology and forgot about the humans behind that technology who were trying to wrestle with it. We wrote to EPSO asking it basically to explain itself. It had not even tested the system before trying it out. Those are the sorts of administrative issues that we would deal with.

The cases that tend to be highlighted more are the ones I mentioned, ethical issues and issues around transparency and so on. A lot of those issues, such as those I described in relation to EPSO, are from small, single-person associations, companies and so on. For example, researchers who get a bit of money from the Commission may not do their accounts properly or may make a mistake and the Commission can sometimes be a little harsh on them because people can be harsh on the Commission in turn if it does not properly manage the funds. I would not quite say we are in the middle but we are basically trying to get the full story out there and, fundamentally, to see that what the Commission did was fair and just.