LERU says moves to simplify EU grants should go back to the start

In order to reduce the excessive red tape surrounding the EC’s current approach, LERU suggests an alternative starting point. First, establish which institutions or companies use an analytical accounting system, are responsible for their financial administration and are subject to an external annual audit and approval of the accounts by a private accountant or a public body. 

In those cases where the usual accounting system is acceptable and an external audit system is established, the obligation to have separate accounting requirements for FP projects should be abolished. To be able to do that, the European Commission should check and ‘certify’ the local accounting procedures and accountability rules.

In cases where the minimum requirements cannot be met, a European Commission model for project administration can still be applied. Institutions or countries should be motivated to move to a more trustworthy financial administration, which is in line with the ‘Modernisation of universities’- agenda. 

As it stands, the majority of FP grants are awarded to a relatively small number of beneficiaries and LERU is convinced that the majority of these beneficiaries are subject to certifiable systems. The certification approach would also decrease the work load of European Commission officials and auditors considerably.

LERU has collected good practice examples based on a comparison of several national funding systems. When it comes to project management and administration, universities are guided by national requirements. National funding agencies are generally the main source of external funding for universities. So to a large extent the regulations of these national funding agencies determine the way in which universities arrange their financial administration and the systems used.

On the basis of the good practice examples collected, LERU suggests that the European Commission takes national funding systems as a starting point when defining new funding regulations. LERU notes that many national funding programmes use much simpler methods than the Commission for research funding. The Commission could accept these simplified methods used by member states as a basis for project accountability in EU programmes. This would remove the requirement for universities to use parallel accounting rules for national and EU projects.

LERU acknowledged the effort the European Commission has already made to introduce the Certificate of Methodology (CoM), which was intended to be a label, granted by the EC, to avoid overburdening FP participants with controls and audits. But LERU says, the effort needed to obtain the CoM is considerable in relation to the modest amount of simplification it offers, and as a result very few institutions have obtained certification.

http://www.leru.org/files/publications/Research_Funding_Note_final.pdf