17. Welcomes the fact that the Court of Auditors considers that the revenue, commitments and payments underlying the accounts of the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth European Development Funds for the year ended 31 December 2009 are in all material respects legal and regular (Statement of Assurance, paragraph VIII); regrets, however, that the Court of Auditors had to draw special attention to the high frequency of non-quantifiable errors affecting commitments and payments but not included in the estimation of total error; recalls, even if th ...[+++]e supervisory and control systems of EuropeAid have significantly improved year after year, that, overall, the Court of Auditors assessed EuropeAid's supervisory and control systems as only partially effective; expects, consequently, from the Commission, a constant follow-up and requests a report on the measures taken to remedy the abovementioned problems;

In particular, she is pleased to see that the Council has taken on board the idea of clarifying what misleading the consumer entails as well as including environmental protection as a factor to be taken into consideration when approving the use of an additive.

of the areas at the final beneficiary stage affecting the eligibility of the expenditure for aid, the Court mentions the inclusion of actions or persons unrelated to the programmes concerned, failure to take account of revenue generated or other income when calculating the net cost of projects, the same expenditure being declared more than once, expenditure without supporting documents, use of arbitrary cost allocation rates, calculation errors, 'and several other failures ...[+++] to respect Community rules' (5.40);

the manifest error of assessment based on the failure to include insolvency costs has been remedied as these costs are now treated as positive cash flow;

the manifest error of assessment based on the failure to take the adjustments made to the restructuring plan in June 1997 into account when calculating the internal rate and the minimum rate has been remedied as these adjustments have now been duly included in the Commission's new calculations for the internal rate and the new assessment of the minimum rate;

III. “League table”: introduce a suitable management information system to allow a qualitative and quantitative assessment to be established and thereby share best-practice across the Commission; notes that a statistical breakdown, by Directorate-General, was not available for the 2 805 commitment proposals, payments and recovery orders, rejected in 1999 by the Financial Controller and Accounting Officer, on a number of grounds including errors due to incorrect draft contracts, ineligible expenditure, ineligible beneficiaries, insufficient consideration of economy and value for money as well as duplicate payments; calls for a comparis ...[+++]on of Directorates-General on a number of management criteria including: payment delays, 'reste à liquider', recoveries initiated and completed, actual to planned execution, hours of training, average time of vacancy of posts and action following financial audits, performance evaluations, allegations of malpractice by whistleblowers and reports by the Anti-Fraud Office;