The Recovery Plan has failed to reform the public administration. EU Court of Auditors: “An opportunity has been wasted”

Brussels – There is little room for debate: the nearly €50 billion allocated through the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) in response to COVID-19 has failed to address the critical shortcomings in the public administration of the 27 Member States. According to a report published yesterday (20 October) by the European Court of Auditors (ECA), the funds disbursed through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) – the main financial instrument of the European NextGenerationEU programme, established to overcome the economic crisis caused by the pandemic by making hundreds of billions of euros in grants and loans available to EU countries until the end of 2026 – “have made only a minimal contribution to addressing the long-standing shortcomings of public administrations in the Member States.” The reason? Countries have focused “primarily on digitalisation rather than on structural reforms” and, as a result, “the challenges relating to administrative capacity, coordination, and governance” have only been partially addressed. Only “just over a third of EU countries have achieved significant results and, in some cases, their sustainability beyond 2026 could be at risk,” the auditors warned. “The RRF could have been used more strategically,” emphasised the member of the European Court of Auditors leading the audit, Ivana Maletić. 

The €49.1 billion from the RRF earmarked for the public administration amounts to 8.5 per cent of the total RRF funding. This percentage amounts to €577 billion. These funds were earmarked for sectors such as “digital transformation, e-government, public procurement, and competition.” To receive this funding, Member States “had to set out reforms and investments in line with the recommendations made under the European Semester, the EU’s framework for economic policy coordination.” 

Specifically, the auditors examined how Member States had followed up on the specific – and country-specific – recommendations on public administration from 2019 and 2020 in their respective national plans, the NRRPs. The assessments revealed that no Member State had fully implemented the recommendations, while only “just over a third of the recommendations had been implemented to a large extent, more than half only to a marginal extent, and some not at all.” The review highlighted that “governments were more likely to tackle certain challenges than others.” For example, “they tended to prioritise measures that could be implemented quickly, such as investments in digitalisation.” In this regard, Maletić observed: “The opportunity to tackle long-standing structural challenges has largely been squandered.” 

More specifically, only 36 per cent of the measures are said to have achieved significant results. For the remaining two-thirds, the Court noted only “limited results, or no evidence.” It should also be noted that only 43 per cent “had adequate performance indicators”. In this regard, the auditors highlighted that “
These issues are likely to persist in the years to come, as the performance monitoring proposed for the EU’s next long-term budget only partially addresses the weaknesses in assessing the results that were identified in several of the ECA’s audits.

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The European Commission’s response

The European Commission justified its position by noting that “although some long-standing national challenges remain unresolved, under the RRF Regulation, Member States were required to address all or a significant part of their country-specific recommendations, not every issue in every policy area.” Furthermore, regarding the observation that not all recommendations relating to public administration had yielded significant results, the Berlaymont building emphasised that “this reflects a lack of available data at this stage, not evidence that there are no results.” And given that “many public administration reforms are structural in nature,” it will take “time for them to produce measurable effects.” Finally, according to the European Commission, “implementation took place in an exceptionally difficult context, characterised by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the energy crisis, high inflation and disruptions to supply chains.” 

According to the European Commission’s database, EU Member States have allocated a total of 400 measures to the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the main financial instrument of NextGenerationEU. Of these, 48 were allocated to the implementation of country-specific recommendations on public administration. The audit focused on the 2019 and 2020 recommendations and covered public administration reforms and investments in 15 Member States, including Italy, with four being assessed in greater depth: the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, and Spain.