Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
“The Court considers that the Commission should give due consideration to the principles of clarity of objectives, simplification, realism, transparency and accountability when designing new and revising existing interventions.”
1 European Court of Auditors, Impact Assessments in the EU institutions: Do they support decision-making?, Special report No 3/2010 (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union 2010).
2 The Evaluation Partnership, Evaluation of the Commission's Impact Assessment System (2007).
3 European Court of Auditors, supra note 1, p. 6.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 46.
6 Ibid., p. 48.
7 Ibid., p. 62 onwards.
8 European Policy Centre, Regulatory Impact Analysis: Improving the Quality of EU Regulatory Activity, Occasional paper (Brussels 2001); Graham Mather and Frank Vibert, Evaluating Better Regulation: Building the System (London: City Research Series No 9, 2006).
9 The National Audit Office in the UK has carried out evaluations of the quality of regulatory impact assessments, but each report had a limited scope. And although of course the evaluations were carried out from an ‘audit perspective’, they have not been cast as ‘audits’. National Audit Office, ‘The NAO's work in regulatory reform’, briefing for the Regulatory Reform Select Committee, October 2010.
10 Tuomas Pöysti, Finnish Auditor General at the European Court of Auditors, Seminar on “The future of public auditing and accountability in the European Union (Luxembourg, 18th October 2007).
11 European Policy Centre, supra note 8, p. 5.
12 Mather and Vibert, supra note 8, p. 31.
13 European Court of Auditors, supra note 1, p. 52.
14 In this case the quality of the data cannot be checked because the underlying data sets have not been published.