OLAF (European Anti-Fraud Office) logo
The OLAF report 2023
Skip to main content

Impact of OLAF investigations

When OLAF concludes an investigation, it often issues recommendations to the competent EU and national authorities, inviting them to take action to redress the fraud, corruption or other illegal activity uncovered by the investigation. OLAF’s recommendations are intended to protect the EU budget and to uphold the rule of law. More specifically, OLAF’s recommendations aim to serve several purposes:

  • Financial recommendations invite competent EU or national authorities to recover amounts that were unduly spent or prevent them from being irregularly spent, or - in customs matters, not duly collected for the EU budget as a result of fraud or irregularities.
  • Judicial recommendations invite a Member State’s judicial authorities to consider initiating criminal proceedings.
  • Disciplinary recommendations aim to sanction wrongdoing by EU staff or Members of EU bodies.
  • Administrative recommendations aim at administrative measures different than, or going beyond, financial or disciplinary action. Such recommendations can aim to reinforce existing policies and control systems or can recommend a specific administrative action, such as excluding an entity from future EU funding or to perform an audit or an administrative check. Administrative recommendations can also address systemic weaknesses uncovered in control systems.

Each year OLAF analyses the follow-up given to its recommendations and reports the results to the Commission’s Corporate Management Board. A summary of the current analysis of such ongoing monitoring work is as follows:

Financial

As illustrated in the following table 6 the sums recommended by OLAF for recovery each year can vary and depend on the scope and scale of the investigations concluded in that particular year. The amounts recommended for recovery are the result of OLAF’s investigative work in 2023, not an indication of the overall level of fraud against the EU budget.

Moreover, in 2023 OLAF recommended EUR1.0438 billion for recovery and EUR 209.4 million was recommended to be prevented from being unduly spent.

Member States are responsible for most EU spending and they also manage the collection of EU customs revenue. Their activities represent the first line of defence against any attempt to defraud the EU budget. OLAF counts on national authorities to perform their work efficiently and diligently, and it supports them through an active exchange of information and through targeted training.

Under sectoral regulations, Member States must report to the European Commission any irregularity or suspicion of fraud they detect exceeding €10,000. An analysis of this data is included in the Commission’s annual report on the protection of the EU’s financial interests (the so-called PIF Report).

In addition to collecting data on Member States’ detections of fraud, OLAF also gathers data on the outcome of the financial recommendations that it has issued.

For the purpose of analysing OLAF's impact, it is assumed that the financial impact of recommendations issued in OLAF cases can be compared, in methodological terms, to the financial impact of the cases of irregularities detected and reported by Member States.

The amount of such financial impact is calculated as the sum of the amount recommended to be recovered and the amount recommended to be prevented from being unduly spent.

The outcome of this comparative analysis is given in the following tables.

The first of the two tables shows the number of irregularities / fraud cases reported in the area of traditional own resources (TOR) between 2019 and 2023 and their financial impact as a percentage of the gross TOR collected and made available to the EU budget by Member States. OLAF’s results are shown alongside those of the national authorities. The second of the two pair of tables shows the number of fraudulent and non-fraudulent irregularities detected in the two main areas of shared management (European Structural and Investment Funds and Agriculture and Rural Development Funds) between 2019 and 2023 and their financial impact expressed as a percentage of total payments, by Member State. Again, OLAF’s results are shown alongside those of national authorities.

OLAF’s analysis highlights once again the very important contribution that OLAF investigations make in helping the relevant authorities recover EU revenue and funds that have been defrauded or irregularly spent.

In terms of TOR, OLAF financial recommendations represent 1.16 % of the gross TOR collected for the EU27, compared with 2.08 % for irregularities and fraud detected by all the Member States together. This means that, for this period, OLAF’s financial recommendations represent about 55% of the entire financial impact of the investigative and control activities of the Member States.

These results also highlight OLAF’s commitment to using resources effectively and concentrating on cases where its input will create most added value. OLAF results are significant also in the shared management areas, where the financial impact of the activities of all Member States together amounts to 1.20 % of payments, while OLAF alone recommended the recovery of an amount representing 0.13 % of payments. In this area, OLAF’s financial recommendations represent about 11 % of the entire impact of investigative and control activities. The reader will note that there are countries where the financial impact of OLAF cases is particularly significant.

Judicial

OLAF’s primary mission is to protect the EU’s financial interests by administrative means. Where an OLAF investigation finds sufficient grounds for suspecting a criminal offence, OLAF issues a judicial recommendation for the competent Member State authorities to consider the initiation of judicial proceedings.

Since the establishment of the EPPO, which became operational in June 2021, the means of prosecution of EU budget fraud in the Member States that have joined the EPPO has changed and this has also led to a natural decrease in the number of judicial recommendations issued by OLAF.

OLAF will continue to issue judicial recommendations to those five Member States that did not join the EPPO [ - Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Sweden and Poland (latter will join the EPPO in 2024), and also continues to monitor the implementation of all judicial recommendations issued prior to the commencement of the EPPO and in which final decisions have not yet been made by the Member States concerned.

Between 2019 and 2023, around 37% of cases that were transmitted by OLAF to national judicial authorities, and on which a decision has already been taken, ended with an indictment (see tables below).

Member States’ judicial authorities are independent and are under no obligation to follow OLAF’s recommendations. Nonetheless, OLAF also examines the reasons provided by Member States as to why judicial recommendations have not been followed. Reasons can include: differences in interpretation of EU and national law or national prosecutors may deem the evidence of criminal wrongdoing to be insufficient. Indeed, despite OLAF’s considerable investigative efforts, its limited investigative powers and practical constraints mean that conclusive evidence of a criminal offence cannot always be collected. In such cases, national authorities may investigate further, which can again lead to an indictment or to the dismissal of the case. In order to address these issues and to improve follow-up at national level, OLAF liaises with Member States on a continuous basis, often before an investigation is closed.

Disciplinary

Disciplinary recommendations issued by OLAF relate to serious misconduct of EU staff or members of the EU institutions and other EU bodies. The recommendations are made to the appointing authority that has the powers to impose disciplinary measures within the institution or body concerned. When making such recommendations, OLAF does not specify the type of action that should be taken.

The disciplinary authorities sometimes take several actions following a single recommendation from OLAF. At the same time, the appointing authority may consider several recommendations resulting from different investigations and subsequently impose one single sanction.

Figures on follow-up (table below) show that the competent authorities have taken a decision on 75% of OLAF’s disciplinary recommendations for the period of 2019-2023. Among the recommendations that resulted in a decision, over 68% were fully or partly implemented.

Administrative

Administrative recommendations are varied in nature, and can be divided into specific/case-related recommendations and generic recommendations:

  • specific recommendations – amounting to 157 between 2019 and 2023, call for measures closely related to the case under investigation, such as administrative sanctions or activation of early detection of risks concerning individual entities or additional fact-finding, e.g. additional audits and administrative verifications focused on specific beneficiaries or spending transactions
  • generic recommendations - totalling 78 between 2019 and 2023, go beyond a single investigation in their scope, addressing systemic weaknesses identified in the regulatory framework and/or management and control systems.

Over 80% of all administrative recommendations were addressed to Commission services or executive agencies.

The table below shows administrative recommendations broken down by groups of recipients and the outcome of the implementation process. 44% of administrative recommendations issued between 2019 and 2023 have been fully or partly implemented and for another 47%, action is still pending.