PURPOSE: presentation by the Commission of the
consolidated annual accounts of the European Union for the
financial year 2016, as part of the 2016 discharge
procedure.
Analysis of the accounts of the European Chemicals
Agency (ECHA).
CONTENT: the organisational governance of the EU
consists of institutions, agencies and other EU bodies whose
expenditure is included in the general budget of the
Union.
This Commission document concerns the EU's
consolidated accounts for the year 2016 and details how spending by
the EU institutions and bodies was carried out. The consolidated
annual accounts of the EU provide financial information on the
activities of the institutions, agencies and other bodies of the EU
from an accrual accounting and budgetary perspective.
It is the responsibility of the Commission's
Accounting Officer to prepare the EU's consolidated annual accounts
and ensure that they present fairly, in all material aspects, the
financial position, the result of the operations and the cash flows
of the EU institutions and bodies, including the European
Chemicals Agency (ECHA), with a view to granting
discharge.
Discharge procedure: the
final step of a budget lifecycle is the discharge of the budget for
a given financial year. It represents the political aspect of the
external control of budget implementation and is the decision by
which the European Parliament, acting on a Council recommendation,
"releases" the Commission (and other EU bodies) from its
responsibility for management of a given budget by marking the end
of that budget's existence. The European Parliament is the
discharge authority within the EU.
The discharge procedure may produce three outcomes:
(i) the granting; (ii) postponement or; (iii) the refusal of the
discharge.
The final discharge report including specific
recommendations to the Commission for action is adopted in plenary
by the European Parliament and are subject to an annual follow up
report in which the Commission outlines the concrete actions it has
taken to implement the recommendations made.
Each agency is subject to its own discharge procedure,
including the ECHA.
The European Chemicals Agency: the Agency, which is located in Helsinki (FI), was
created by Council
Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 to manage and steer the
implementation of the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and
Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation.
Main achievements in 2016: these include:
- further advancement in the integration of REACH and
the Classification, Labelling and Packaging (CLP)
regulation;
- publishing its second five years report on the
operation of REACH providing input into the second review of the
REACH Regulation;
- the fees and charges collected covered 46% of the
Agencys expenditure including for the first time a high
proportion of fees from authorisation applications. Managing the
annual budget was more challenging than in previous years, as the
magnitude of the fee-based financing was difficult to foresee,
particularly for the biocide applications;
- signing a delegation agreement with the Commission in
December 2016 to build an EU-wide observatory for
nanomaterials that aims at giving objective and reliable
information on markets and safety aspects of nanomaterials in the
EU market;
- maintaining an open dialogue with the EU institutions,
in particular the European Parliament.
As regards the accounts,
ECHA is financed through fees paid by industry and by an EU
balancing subsidy.
Commitment
appropriations:
- available: EUR 113
million;
- made: EUR 110 million.
Payment appropriations:
- available: EUR 124 million;
- paid: EUR 106 million.
For further details on
expenditure, please refer to the final
accounts of the ECHA.