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 IMI 2 Joint Undertaking.

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 IMI 2 JU, 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 IMI 2 JU.

IMI 2 Joint Undertaking: the IMI 2 Joint undertaking, which is located in Brussels, was set up by Council Regulation (EU) No 557/2014, for a period up to 31 December 2024. The IMI 2 Joint Undertaking aims to increase clinical trial success rates of priority medicines identified by the World health Organization and where possible, reduce the time to reach clinical proof of concept in medicine development for certain diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

The socio-economic impacts of the first IMI projects to finish in 2016 confirms that the projects leverage funding and are delivering on IMI’s goal of helping to make concrete improvements to the medicines development process.

As regards the JU’s accounts, these are presented in detail in the document published by the Joint Undertaking (please refer to the final accounts of the IMI 2 JU).