Mr. Tony Murphy:

It is drawn down at least, and is available for disbursement. We have done a lot of audits in the area just mentioned. We did a specific audit on organic farming. We did another on the CAP plans and we reviewed those plans. We do many audits in these areas. Some of them have come up, but, generally speaking, we find the same things. If you look at our reports, many of our recommendations and comments stated that the targets or goals may have been too optimistic. Monitoring it and proving value for money can be very difficult. The Senator is talking about small community programmes not being able to demonstrate it. Member states cannot even demonstrate it. They do not have proper performance monitoring systems in place to show what the impact of a particular policy is and what it is not.

We have done quite a few audits because there is a lot of money involved. Since 2014, there has been funding of about €12 billion for organic farming. That is across the EU, but it is still a lot. The value of our report is that we can point to some member states where it was actually quite successful and others where it was not.