Outsourcing services

Since 1 January 2003, a number of administrative and support tasks that were previously the province of our Directorate-General have been transferred to three new administrative offices.

In the main, the transferred duties were everyday administrative activities such as managing the payroll and facilities - the idea being to rationalise the Commission's internal activities and make the overall services it provides more effective.

In all the outsourced areas, the Commission continues to take policy decisions and decisions in principle: the new offices are merely responsible for their implementation.

The newly created offices are the following:

Office for the Administration and Payment of Individual Entitlements - responsible for determining, calculating and disbursing the monetary entitlements of individual staff, e.g. wages and salaries, expenses for business travel, health / accident insurance, etc.
Two Offices for Infrastructure and Logistics - one in Brussels and the other in Luxembourg - responsible for the following: implementing the Commission's buildings policy, finding and administering the office space used by the Commission, building maintenance and technical work, building security, procurement, supplies/inventories, logistics and internal services.

Furthermore, an inter institutional office has been set up to recruit staff on behalf of the Community institutions - the European Personnel Selection Office.