Marta Andreasen attacks Commission accounts claims

Marta Andreasen, former chief accountant of the European Commission, who was suspended in 2002 and later sacked for publicly exposing failures and weaknesses in the European Union’s accounting system, says the Commission’s latest attempts to blame the Court of Auditors for using an “inadequate” auditing system is “the biggest absurdity I have ever heard.” She was “pretty upset” that a House of Lords committee had also reached this conclusion as the Lords had “very little knowledge of what accounting and auditing is.” Ms Andreasen told Fraud Intelligence that “basically nothing has changed” in the Brussels accounting methods. There were still problems over the computer system, lack of internal control and lack of accountability on the part of the chief accountant, she said.