EU’s main COVID fund – the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) – has done little to resolve longstanding weaknesses in public administrations in the member states, according to a new audit report published on Wednesday by the European Court of Auditors (ECA).
The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the need for efficient public administration in EU countries. In response, the EU provided member states with €49.1 billion from the RRF for public administration measures, equivalent to 8.5 % of the RRF’s total funding of €577 billion.
Member states were supposed to carry out reforms and investments linked to the 2019 and 2020 country specific recommendations (CSR) issued as part of the European Semester, the EU’s framework for coordinating their economic policies.
Member states could also put forward additional measures that go beyond the CSRs, a Commission spokesperson told The Brussels Times. “The CSRs are limited in number and reflect a prioritisation of challenges based on the specific national context. This does not mean that the CSRs are the only national priorities or challenges.”
Scope of public administration
In the report, ECA describes public administration in the broadest terms as “the public institutions or bodies involved in the design, regulation, implementation or enforcement of public policies at central, regional and local level”. Public administration is a member state competency and is not defined in the RRF regulation or other EU legislation.
That does not imply that policy frameworks and guidelines are missing. Digitalisation and e-government are key elements of publication administration reform (PAR) in both EU member states and candidate countries according to EUPAN, the European Public Administration Network, and SIGMA, the joint initiative of the OECD and the EU in ‘Support for Improvement in Governance and Management’.
Other elements in PAR are legislation on administrative procedures, policy coordination, access to public documents, data protection, non-political recruitment of civil servants and decentralisation (local self-government).
E-government is closely linked to accountability and transparency in the public sector, among others public procurement. It creates an audit trail for auditors, empowers citizens and journalists, and improves service delivery to citizens and enterprises. It has also a strong impact on the fight against corruption by eliminating the possibility of officials to extort or accept petty bribes.
“There are indeed various specific pieces of legislation which use the term ‘public administration’ or a similar term,” the Commission spokesperson explained. "In its work, the Commission looks at key aspects of public administration such as policy planning, policy coordination and policy development, civil service and human resource management, accountability, service delivery and public financial management."
“In general, the Commission understands that public administration comprises all organisations of the executive power at central, regional and local level involved in the design, regulation or enforcement of public policies. It is governed by special rules for recruitment, functioning and accountability."
Selection of measures
Lacking a clear definition of the scope of public administration reform, the audit team focused on the country-specific recommendations relating to public administration and how measures in the national recovery and resilience plans (RRP) addressed those challenges.
The six pillars defined in the RRF Regulation have been broken down into 52 policy areas by the Commission. Each reform or investment could be assigned to a maximum of two policy areas. Two of the 52 policy areas relate directly to public administration: “effectiveness of public administration and national systems” and “e-government, digital public services and local digital ecosystems”.
In total 400 RRF measures across all 27 member states were assigned to 48 CSRs linked to these two policy areas. The RRF Regulation requires each plan to contribute to address ‘all or a significant subset’ of the entire set of CSRs. From the pool of all measures in the RRF, ECA selected 235 measures that were most directly related to public administration with an overarching or horizontal character.
The audit covered public administration reforms and investments in 15 member states that had received sub-CSRs in the public administration area: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Spain. More in-depth data collections were carried out on the spot in four countries: Czechia, Germany, Greece and Spain.
"The RRF could have been used more strategically to make public administrations in the member states stronger,” said Ivana Maletić, the Croatian ECA Member leading the audit. “The opportunity to address longstanding structural challenges was largely missed. With the EU now preparing its next long-term budget, it has a chance to learn from these shortcomings and focus more clearly on measuring results."
Focus on digitilisation
The reforms and investments funded through the RRF only partly tackled challenges related to administrative capacity, coordination and governance, and focused mainly on digitalisation rather than on structural reforms. In some cases, their sustainability beyond 2026 may be at risk, the auditors warn.
The auditors found that none of the recommendations had been addressed in full. Just over a third of the recommendations had been addressed to a large extent, more than half only marginally, and some not at all. Member states tended to favour measures that could be implemented quickly, such as investment in digitalisation. As a result, many other structural challenges remain largely unresolved.
So far, only 36 % of the public administration measures that were examined have achieved significant results. For the remaining two thirds, the auditors found only limited results, or no evidence of results at all. Moreover, fewer than half of the measures checked (43 %) had proper result indicators.
Without them, it is impossible to say whether reforms have led to faster procedures, lower administrative costs, improved solutions for users, or better governance, according to ECA. These issues are likely to persist in the years to come. Similar weaknesses in assessing the results have been identified in several of the previous audits of the RRF.
The auditors also checked the EU’s Technical Support Instrument (TSI), which provides EU countries with support in designing and implementing reforms. They found that the TSI had only a marginal impact on supporting implementation of specific public administration reforms, as the TSI was mostly general in scope. None of the four visited countries had used TSI as direct support for the reforms.
Disagreement on recommendations
ECA’s audit was focused on the RRF funding of public administration reform but only one of the recommendations deals with this issue (Strengthen the performance monitoring framework in the next MFF). Most recommendations are general in nature and mainly relate to next multiannual financial framework (MFF).
In its reply, the Commission rejected ECA’s critique. The RRF Regulation does not require full coverage of every individual sub-CSR, nor does it require the member states to address public administration issues specifically. The Commission considers the coverage by RRF measures of public administration-related sub-CSRs as a positive result and fully consistent with the intention of the co-legislators.
It also noted that complex measures, such as structural reforms in the public administration, often need time to produce measurable results. For this reason, milestones and targets generally focus on outputs rather than result indicators.
As in previous audits, the Commission replied that it cannot prejudge the outcome of the institutional negotiations and sticked to its known position that the RRF model, which links disbursements to the fulfilment of milestones and targets and not on actual incurred costs, will be applied in the next MFF. It did not accept the audit recommendation that reforms should be linked to clearly defined, measurable policy results.
“Ambitious budgets demand equally ambitious safeguards”, said ECA President Tony Murphy when he presented the annual audit report on the 2025 EU budget earlier in October. “If the EU moves to a new budget model where financing is no longer linked to costs, we must learn from experience and address what has not worked before, so that EU funds deliver the intended outcomes for citizens.”
“We therefore reiterate our call for co-legislators to address the issues and lessons set out in our opinions on the MFF proposals and our recent work on the RRF.”
Questions to ECA and the Commission
The audit covered all 15 member states that had declared RRF measures that addressed public country-specific recommendations related to public administration. According to the report, these measures only accounted for 4.6% of total funding. Does that mean that actual RRF spending on public administration was much less than allocated (8.5 %)
“No, this is not about spending,” the audit team replied. “It is about how well the recommendations were addressed. We have no such direct comparison in the report between what was spent and what allocated. In the audit we excluded sector-specific measures, such as those concerning energy, schools, building renovation and public transport, to focus on core public administration functions.”
The figure on RRF spending related to public administration measures matches an estimate made by the Commission in a thematic analysis in July 2024. While it does not reflect the changes to the national plans (RRPs) made since then, it provided a comprehensive view of all plans. It identified 309 reforms and 217 investments, with a total cost estimate of EUR 23.2 bn, around 3.58% of the total estimated costs of the 27 RRPs.
The report seems critical against the audit finding that digitalisation and e-government measures accounted for 53 % of all public administration measures and 71 % of the total estimated costs. Why?
“We are not criticising this fact," ECA replied. "It's an observation. Digitilisation and e-government can make an important contribution to improve public services. Rather, we are saying that many structural challenges remained unaddressed. Notably, we found that only one in seven CSRs related to ‘governance’ was largely addressed."
“The question is therefore whether the chosen measures sufficiently addressed the underlying challenges and delivered improvements for citizens in a most effective way.”
On this point, the Commission agreed with ECA. “We don’t read the report as being critical on the share of digital public administration measures. It simply notes the share as a fact but does not seem to express a judgement (negative or positive) on this.”
However, the Commission noted that the ECA has presented digitalisation and structural reforms as contrasting aims. “We firmly disagree with this suggestion. Public administrations’ digitalisation and e-government reforms can have a structural impact just as any other public administration reforms and are urgently needed."
“We therefore certainly welcome the significant share of e-government measures in the plans. The Commission considers reform for digital and e-government services to be of high relevance, as is evident from both the Semester documents and the Digital Decade Policy programme.”
“Furthermore, the RRF Regulation puts a firm incentive for member states to include digital measures in their plans, requiring them to foresee at least 20% of their estimated costs for measures contributing to digital objectives. A high share of digital measures is thus present across policy areas and was an explicit political objective of the instrument.”
