Administrative

Administrative recommendations are varied in nature. They can be classified into specific/case-related recommendations and generic recommendations:

• specific recommendations (137 between 2018 and 2022) call for measures closely related to the case under investigation, such as administrative sanctions or activation of early risk detection concerning individual entities or additional fact-finding, e.g. additional audits and administrative verifications focused on specific beneficiaries or spending transactions
• generic recommendations (73 between 2018 and 2022) go beyond a single investigation in their scope, addressing systemic weaknesses identified in the regulatory framework and/or management and control systems.

The single most important type of administrative recommendations concerns measures under the Early Detection and Exclusion System (EDES) set up in line with the Financial Regulation. 100 such case-related administrative recommendations were recorded between 2018 and 2022. EDES is an inter-institutional system for the protection of the EU’s financial interests from unreliable persons and entities. Under the conditions laid down in the Financial Regulation, such persons and entities may be flagged as posing a risk to the EU’s financial interests or excluded from EU funding or sanctioned in other ways where fraud, irregularities or certain other types of misconduct have been established. Issuing and implementing EDES-related recommendations makes it possible to draw practical consequences from OLAF investigations relatively quickly, usually more swiftly than through judicial recommendations.

As regards the recipients of administrative recommendations, around three quarters of them were addressed to Commission services or executive agencies.

The table below shows administrative recommendations broken down by (groups of) recipients and outcome of the implementation process: 45% of administrative recommendations issued between 2018 and 2022 have been fully or partly implemented. For another 45%, action is pending; part of those recommendations are likely to be implemented over time.

In general, specific recommendations attain a higher implementation rate than generic recommendations. Generic recommendations, especially those targeting regulatory frameworks, are more difficult to implement as they mostly require a consensus between various actors and may be subjected to complex adoption procedures. This is also one of the reasons why the implementation of a considerable part of the administrative recommendations issued is still ongoing. Another reason is the fact that the number of administrative recommendations rose sharply in 2022, from 38 in 2021 to 61 in 2022; recommendations issued recently are naturally less advanced in the implementation process.

16 recommendations were found to be obsolete and therefore excluded from the analysis in this section.