The European Commission has warned that not complying with the fundamental reforms of a recovery plan, such as the pensions in the case of Spain, “it will cost a lot“, while in Madrid the Government has continued to defend the rapid implementation of the plan before the delegation of MEPs.
“Not complying with a fundamental reform of a (recovery) plan will cost a lot, as it should be,” community sources have assured when asked in particular about the pension reform in Spainwhose completion was promised by the end of 2023 and is now almost two months behind schedule.
The community Executive has published this Tuesday a document that details the methodology that it will use to approve partial payments to the Member States when it considers that some of the commitments that a disbursement contemplates have not been fully satisfied. In this case, the amount to be disbursed would be reduced for each non-compliance by an amount equal to the division of all the funds allocated by country between the total number of milestones and objectives of the plan, which in the case of Spain are 69,500 million among 415 milestones. However, this penalty could be multiplied by five for those commitments “related to the entry into force of a reform or the final step for the implementation of a non-legislative reform.”
The Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations, José Luis Escrivá, was in Brussels on Monday, where he said that The Government is very close to closing the reform on which it depends that Spain fully collects the next tranche of the recovery fund, of 10,000 million euros, a payment that has not yet been requested.
This Tuesday afternoon in Madrid, Escrivá met with the members of the Budgetary Control Committee of the European Parliament who are visiting Spain this week to supervise the management of European funds, after the Minister of Finance did so in the morning, Maria Jesus Montero.
The execution of funds
Montero explained that Spain, as the most advanced country in the execution of the funds, has already reached 75% of recognized obligations of all the resources budgeted for 2021 and 2022, and has highlighted that the deployment of these resources has been characterized by joint management with the autonomous communities and town halls.
During the press conference after the Council of Ministers, he said that he has the impression that the MEPs are “surprised” by the instruments put in place by the Government of Spain to improve the execution and control of European funds, which reinforce auditing, control and fraud prevention systems that allow conflicts of interest to be anticipated.
One of them is the comprehensive system for monitoring and managing milestones and objectives (CoFFEE) and the other, the system for detecting conflicts of interest ex ante through data mining (Minerva), two instruments that are a internal control test with which the funds are managed and which are also complemented by the training of more than 2,200 public employees who work with European funds.
They do not reach SMEs and the self-employed
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The president of ATA and vice president of the CEOE, Lorenzo Amor, has criticized that European funds are not reaching the business fabric, especially in the case of SMEs and the self-employed. “The self-employed do not receive the funds. Of the more than 3,300,000 self-employed, barely 5 out of 100 have applied for the funds, they do not reach 170,000 self-employed and we must reach at least 1 million. Our objective is to improve and we have to do it now”, assured the vice president of ATA, Celia Ferrero, after meeting with the delegation of MEPs.
As an example, he has given that the digital kit aid has only benefited 70,000 freelancers.