Requirements for budgetary frameworks of the Member States - Main contents

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 306/41

There is a need to build upon the experience gained during the first decade of the economic and monetary union. Recent economic developments have posed new challenges to the conduct of fiscal policy across the Union and have in particular highlighted the need for strengthening national ownership and having uniform requirements as regards the rules and procedures forming the budgetary frameworks of the Member States. In particular, it is necessary to specify what national authorities must do to comply with the provisions of the Protocol (No 12) on the excessive deficit procedure annexed to the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), and in particular Article 3 thereof.

Member State governments and government sub-sectors maintain public accounting systems which include elements such as bookkeeping, internal control, financial reporting, and auditing. Those systems should be distinguished from statistical data which relate to the outcomes of government finances based on statistical methodologies, and from forecasts or budgeting actions which relate to future government finances.

Complete and reliable public accounting practices for all sub-sectors of general government are a precondition for the production of high-quality statistics that are comparable across Member States. Internal control should ensure that existing rules are enforced throughout the sub-sectors of general government. Independent audits conducted by public institutions such as courts of auditors or by private auditing bodies should encourage best international practices.

The availability of fiscal data is crucial to the proper functioning of the budgetary surveillance framework of the Union. The regular availability of timely and reliable fiscal data is the key to proper and well timed monitoring, which in turn allows prompt action in the event of unexpected budgetary developments. A crucial element in ensuring the quality of fiscal data is transparency, which must entail the regular public availability of such data.

With regard to statistics, Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 2009 on European statistics (3) established a legislative framework for the production of European statistics with a view to the formulation, application, monitoring and assessment of the policies of the Union. That Regulation also laid down the principles governing the development, production and dissemination of European statistics: professional independence, impartiality, objectivity, reliability, statistical confidentiality and cost-effectiveness, giving precise definitions of each of these principles. Council Regulation (EC) No 479/2009 of 25 May 2009 on the application of the Protocol on the excessive deficit procedure annexed to the Treaty establishing the European Community (4), strengthened the Commission’s powers to verify statistical data used for the excessive deficit procedure.

The definitions of ‘government’, ‘deficit’ and ‘investment’ are laid down in the Protocol (No 12) on the excessive deficit procedure by reference to the European System of Integrated Economic Accounts (ESA), replaced by the European system of national and...