{"id":468780,"date":"2026-10-21T15:24:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T13:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/2026\/10\/21\/il-recovery-ha-fallito-nella-riforma-della-pa-la-corte-dei-conti-ue-sprecata-unopportunita\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T16:25:52","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T14:25:52","slug":"the-recovery-plan-has-failed-to-reform-the-public-administration-eu-court-of-auditors-an-opportunity-has-been-wasted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/2026\/10\/21\/the-recovery-plan-has-failed-to-reform-the-public-administration-eu-court-of-auditors-an-opportunity-has-been-wasted\/","title":{"rendered":"The Recovery Plan has failed to reform the public administration. EU Court of Auditors: \u201cAn opportunity has been wasted\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brussels \u2013 There is little room for debate: the nearly \u20ac50 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<\/a> published yesterday (20 October) by the European Court of Auditors (ECA), the funds disbursed through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) <\/strong> \u2013 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 – \u201chave made only a minimal contribution to addressing the long-standing shortcomings of public administrations in the Member States.\u201d<\/strong> The reason? Countries have focused \u201cprimarily on digitalisation rather than on structural reforms\u201d and, as a result, \u201cthe challenges relating to administrative capacity, coordination, and governance\u201d have only been partially addressed. Only \u201cjust over a third of EU countries have achieved significant results and, in some cases, their sustainability beyond 2026 could be at risk,<\/strong>\u201d the auditors warned. \u201cThe RRF could have been used more strategically,\u201d emphasised the member of the European Court of Auditors leading the audit, Ivana Maleti\u0107<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

The \u20ac49.1 billion from the RRF earmarked for the public administration amounts to 8.5 per cent of the total RRF funding<\/strong>. This percentage amounts to \u20ac577 billion. These funds were earmarked for sectors such as \u201cdigital transformation, e-government, public procurement, and competition.\u201d To receive this funding, Member States \u201chad to set out reforms and investments in line with the recommendations made under the European Semester<\/a>, the EU\u2019s framework for economic policy coordination.\u201d <\/p>\n

Specifically, the auditors examined how Member States had followed up on the specific \u2013 and country-specific \u2013 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<\/strong>, while only \u201cjust 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.\u201d The review highlighted that \u201cgovernments were more likely to tackle certain challenges than others.\u201d For example, \u201cthey tended to prioritise measures that could be implemented quickly, such as investments in digitalisation.\u201d In this regard, Maleti\u0107 observed: \u201cThe opportunity to tackle long-standing structural challenges has largely been squandered.<\/strong>\u201d <\/p>\n

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 \u201climited results, or no evidence.\u201d It should also be noted that only 43 per cent \u201chad adequate performance indicators\u201d. In this regard, the auditors highlighted that \u201c
\nThese issues are likely to persist in the years to come, as the performance monitoring proposed for the EU\u2019s next long-term budget<\/a> only partially addresses the weaknesses in assessing the results that were identified in several of the ECA\u2019s audits.<\/p>\n

\u200b\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The European Commission\u2019s response<\/h4>\n

\n

The European Commission justified its position by noting that \u201calthough 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.\u201d Furthermore, regarding the observation that not all recommendations relating to public administration had yielded significant results, the Berlaymont building emphasised that \u201cthis reflects a lack of available data at this stage, not evidence that there are no results.<\/strong>\u201d And given that \u201cmany public administration reforms are structural in nature,\u201d it will take \u201ctime for them to produce measurable effects.\u201d Finally, according to the European Commission, \u201cimplementation took place in an exceptionally difficult context, characterised by Russia\u2019s war of aggression against Ukraine, the energy crisis, high<\/strong> inflation and disruptions to supply chains.<\/strong>\u201d <\/p>\n

According to the European Commission\u2019s 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<\/a>, with four being assessed in greater depth: the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, and Spain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the latest audit, the auditors highlighted that EU countries have focused primarily on digitalisation rather than on structural reforms<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7908,"featured_media":468747,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_category":"1","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_prev_next_post":"1","show_popup_post":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_author_box":"0","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"0"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[25705],"tags":[26267,25871,26763,27736,27493,36319,35217,30170,26870],"class_list":["post-468780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-corte-dei-conti-en","tag-czechrepublic-en","tag-greece-en","tag-next-generation-europe","tag-palazzo-berlaymont","tag-public-procurement-at","tag-spain-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7908"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468781,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468780\/revisions\/468781"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}