The Ombudsman has made a series of suggestions to help the European Commission ensure greater transparency and accountability with regards to the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF)—an over €700 billion funding programme intended to help the EU economy recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the socio-economic effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

While the Ombudsman welcomed recent steps taken by the Commission, such as providing more information through its dedicated RRF website and requiring EU Member States to set up easy-to-use public portals containing data on major funding recipients, she said that there was still room for improvement.

Her suggestions include asking the Commission to ensure Member States who have not yet set up public portals do so and asking the Commission to encourage Member States to publish all beneficiaries of the funds. She also asked it to continue publishing preliminary assessments of Member States’ payment requests, to publish machine translations of national recovery plans, and to make improvements to how it handles access to documents requests.

The Ombudsman found it regrettable that there was a lack of detail around how the Commission supervises the spending of recovery funds in Member States. She said she would continue to monitor how the Commission supervises the RRF and ensures transparency.

Background

Given the unprecedented size and scope of the RRF, the Ombudsman has emphasised the importance of providing accessible information about the loans and grants it supports. In particular, she noted that the public should be reassured that Member States comply with any conditions attached to the funding they receive.

The Ombudsman’s office, in cooperation with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has published a set of good practice principles to help ensure transparency in how the funds are used.

The Ombudsman has also previously called on the Commission to treat access to document requests concerning the funds with greater consistency and to better explain its reasoning if it decides not release asked-for information.