The EU Commission, fraud, and a whopping £100bn of spending ‘affected by material error’ in 2024

British taxpayers’ money paid to the EU continues to be affected, so EU auditors' report matters

Montage © Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2025

For 6th year running, EU’s auditors give ‘Adverse Opinion’ on Commission’s spending of member’s money

Meanwhile EU Commission once again tries to pretend it got a good report

Every October, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) issues its report on how the EU Commission spent the billions of its member countries’ contributions to the overall budget in the previous year. And every October Brexit Facts4EU publishes the damning findings of the EU’s own auditors.

This year is no different, except that this is now the sixth year running that the European Court of Auditors (ECA) has published an ‘Adverse Opinion’. This Opinion has been issued as a result of the ECA’s audit of Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission’s spending of the €250bn of money given to it by EU taxpayers last year (2024).

Summary

An incredible €116bn (approx. £101bn) of the €168bn was found to be ‘affected by material error’
So, 69% of all the spending of von der Leyen’s Commission’s spending which was checked was affected
Accordingly, the Auditor’s issued an official ‘Adverse Opinion’ – for the sixth year running
Some of this is UK taxpayers’ money, while UK is still paying EU contributions nearly 5 years after Brexit

For the vast majority of the Commission’s expenditure in 2024, the errors were ‘material and pervasive’

The ECA’s main test is whether errors (from outright fraud, to monies being approved when they didn’t qualify for approval) are ‘material and pervasive’ and it is this test which the EU Commission of Ursula von der Leyen once again failed – by some margin.

These numbers are so unbelievable Brexit Facts4EU is once again publishing them in graphic form

‘Nothing to see here’, says EU Commission

Every October it’s the same story. The European Court of Auditors issues a damning report and every October the EU Commission paints a rosy picture of the audit. This year was no different.

Below we show how the ECA characterised its report in its headline.

And here is how the EU Commission characterised the same report in its headline.

So how does the EU Commission get away with this, and why does no other media outlet report on this?

The reason this never makes the headlines is because all journalists read the EU Commission’s press statements, but far, far fewer read those of the Court of Auditors. The EU Commission’s press statement stresses that the EU’s accounts were give ‘a clean bill of health’. In the round this may be technically true because the Auditors look at both sides of the equation: money in and money out.

When it comes to collecting the money it is due from member states, the Commission performs extremely well. This may not surprise anyone.

The problems only appear when looking at ‘money out’ – how all these billions are spent. In layman’s terms, this is what most people are interested in. They assume that countries make their contributions to the EU budget as they should. What they want to know is what happens to that money, and it is here that the problems surface.

For this to be clear and free from any journalistic bias, we will quote directly from the ECA

“A substantial proportion of this expenditure is materially affected by error. This concerns expenditure subject to complex rules, mainly reimbursement-based, in which the estimated level of error is 5.2%. Such expenditure amounted to €115.7 billion in 2024, representing 68.9% of our audit population [total amount looked at - ED.]. The effects of the errors we found are therefore both material and pervasive to the year's accepted expenditure and we are issuing an adverse opinion on EU budget expenditure.”
- ECA, Oct 2025

The ECA goes on to look at the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) expenditure, relating to post-Covid recovery. Here again there were errors and the Auditors issued a ‘Qualified Opinion’. This is not as bad as an ‘Adverse Opinion’ but we can say that no public company would wish to have such an opinion from its auditors.

In the course of their work the auditors also identified 19 cases of suspected fraud. They reported these cases to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), which has already opened six investigations. Seven of these cases were reported at the same time to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), which opened investigations into all seven.

How this fraud affects the British taxpayer

One of the many benefits of Brexit is that the UK is no longer a full contributor to the EU budget and therefore is less affected by the truly vast amount of EU Commission spending in 2024 where errors in expenditure were found to be ‘material and pervasive’ (£101bn).

That said, the disastrous Withdrawal Agreement and ‘Divorce Bill’ negotiated by Theresa May and her civil servants and subsequently agreed to in a later administration included ongoing payments to the EU for decades to come.

The last time Brexit Facts4EU did a formal investigation of the amounts that had been paid during the ‘Transition Period’, and then the period after the official exit of the UK on 01 January 2021 up until July 2023, the total paid by the British taxpayer was £33bn. Below are the charts we produced at that time, using the official statistics.

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Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary

Payments to the EU arising from the Withdrawal Agreement and Theresa May’s ‘Divorce Bill’

1. UK payments to the EU in the 11-mth Transition Period (Feb-Dec 2020)

© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2025 - click to enlarge
[Source : Office for National Statistics - Public Sector Finance Tables, 22 Aug 2023.]

2. UK payments since ‘full exit’ on 31 Dec 2020

© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2025 - click to enlarge
[Source : Office for National Statistics - Public Sector Finance Tables, 22 Aug 2023.]

3. Grand total of payments

£33.12bn paid by the UK to the EU since 2020

Observations

Year after year we live in expectation that the EU Commission will finally start controlling its expenditure in a way that might be expected when dealing with “other people’s money”.

In this case we are looking at £100bn which the Commission has received from its member states – and also partly from the UK thanks to Theresa May agreeing to a ‘Divorce Bill’ – which has been declared by the EU’s own auditors to have ‘material and pervasive errors’, which include fraud amongst other things.

The EU’s own auditors consider this to be unacceptable and so do we. The auditors are still investigating cases going back 2-3 years, when the UK’s continued contributions were still at a high level, as we have shown above. Having read through the auditors’ report, we know that the worst area of expenditure relates to the EU’s ‘Social Cohesion’ fund, to which the UK always contributed handsomely but from which the UK never received a penny back. This fund is only accessible by the poorer states in the EU. The wrongful use of money given out by the EU Commission is clearly an area where much tighter control is needed.

Some may feel that the UK should simply have refused to keep paying into the EU’s coffers for all the years this abuse has been going on…

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[ Sources: European Court of Auditors | European Commission | Office for National Statistics - Public Sector Finance Tables ] Politicians and journalists can contact us for details, as ever.

Brexit Facts4EU.Org, Tues 14 Oct 2025

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Reader Comments 6

1. Ashley Great Britain , Tuesday, October 14, 2025, 13:30:

And as a nice thank you they send us loads of migrants, threaten to switch off parts of our electricity, prevent us from buying and selling into Northern Ireland, take all our fish for free and impose 50% steel tax, and that's only parts of the problems. If we left the EU why on earth are we paying into their system?
We hope Reform uk will be as tough on the EU as trump has been with everything. They deserve to be punished something chronic.

2. Have You Wondered , Tuesday, October 14, 2025, 14:09:

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Marta Andreasen - surfaces again 20yrs later. "This is the story of my experience at the European Union, a story that started in the Spring of 2001 and has not yet come to an end."
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( Search: (Hansard) HC Deb 21 June 2005 vol 436 cc1061-2 and her book 'Brussels Laid Bare' ISBN: 9780955418815
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Andreasen criticised the EU's accounting system for being open to fraud.[6] She raised her criticisms and proposals for overdue improvements and changes internally, but made no progress with her superior. She then submitted her report to Commissioner Michaele Schreyer and Commission President Romano Prodi. She again received no answers and so approached members of the EU Parliament's Budget Control Committee.
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She, consequently, refused to sign off the 2001 European Commission accounts. In the discharge procedure in 2003 the Commission promised comprehensive reform.
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At this stage the media began to investigate and to report. Andreasen went public with her concerns on 1 August 2002.
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Sacking: (By non less than Neil Kinnock)
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Andreasen was fully suspended from her job by the Commission in May 2002 (for "violating Articles 12 and 21 of staff regulations, failure to show sufficient loyalty and respect"). She is said to have been suspended from her job and ultimately fired because she refused to sign accounts she believed were unreliable.
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The EU’s spending watchdog estimated in its annual review, released overnight, that 5.6 percent of the EU budget in 2023 was spent in a way that broke the rules ......
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Destructive accounting: EU audit master Tony Murphy warned about skyrocketing EU debt and told reporters he’s not a fan of tentative Commission plans
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So - yet again:
Why does the UK (or any other nation) need another level of corruption and malfeasance above that which the UK has already?
.

3. KB , Tuesday, October 14, 2025, 14:44:

The stand out in this story to me is the amount we are still paying into the EU after we have left.
Looking into this further it appears we have set aside £10 billion for future payments.
Why are we not threatening to stop this if they impose the steel tariff on us ?

4. Sparky , Tuesday, October 14, 2025, 18:37:

Still campaigning to leave!!!
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We’re paying because we still have obligations. Remember “they can whistle”!!
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Remember we hold all the cards!!

5. Gazzablack , Tuesday, October 14, 2025, 19:04:

4, sparkless
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Meanwhile the French, in fury, tear up the EU flag and shout for "Frexit"
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Germany is considering g increasing the pension age to 73, which is the dire state of it's pension system.
It could cause similar increases in other members.
And no sparkless, we owed no obligations to the EU.
Just because we agreed to make payments to the EU doesn't mean we were obligated to.
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6. Gazzablack , Wednesday, October 15, 2025, 00:03:

The IMF has confirmed in it's most recent report that Brexit has resulted in the UK having a significantly lower effective tariff rate with the USA than the EU has managed to secure.
.
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Sir John Curtis was asked about polling on Brexit : and replied that since Brexit the EU has removed even more sovereignty from member states and that those campaigning for remaining are in denial.

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