The European Court of Auditors critically evaluated the Joint Undertakings, but gave excellent marks to the overall performance of Horizon 2020.
The current Research and Innovation Framework Programme, Horizon 2020 (H2020), is slowly but surely ending. With the transition to the successor programme, Horizon Europe, in 2021, several things will change. Among the changes is also a restructuring of the partnership landscape with fewer European Partnerships in only three distinct forms, co-funded, co-programmed and institutionalised partnerships. The latter will also become the new form for public-private partnerships with industry, research groups, international organisations and Member States under Article 187 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU commonly known as Joint Undertakings (JUs). Several of the H2020 JUs will find continuation as a new institutionalised partnership, it is therefore essential to learn from their current form and improve their management and performance.
The reports of the European Court of Auditors (ECA) will certainly help to create a basis for such efforts. On 12 November, the ECA published its report on the financial year of 2019 for the EU JUs. While the auditors confirm, that the financial management of the JUs is healthy, they found several aspects for potential improvement. Among these are areas of budgetary and financial management, in-kind contributions, the internal control and monitoring framework for procurement procedures, grant payments and human resources. However, the auditors also noted that several of the H2020 JUs fell short of targets. In spite of the end of 2019 being far beyond the mid-point of the programme, the JUs had implemented on average only 51% of their planned H2020 and related additional activities. The completion rate becomes even less, if the additional activities are excluded. On the other hand, the JUs had completed most of their call procedures and had awarded or signed on average 78% of their grants with H2020. All JUs had also taken corrective actions to follow up on the ECA’s observations in previous years (see SwissCore article).
As in previous years, the ECA voiced criticism on the annual accounts for the ‘Fusion for Energy’ (F4E) JU. The report draws attention to the risk of further cost increases and delays in the ITER project implementation. The auditors found that weaknesses in the JU’s procurement procedures, the management of its human resources and ITER project monitoring might lace the staff performance and operations effectiveness at risk.
The ECA also looked at H2020 performance at a higher level far beyond the JUs. On 17 November, it published a report ‘on the performance of the EU budget – Status at the end of 2019’, which examines the results achieved by several spending programmes including H2020. Overall, the report shows mixed results and points out that the quality of the Commission’s performance assessments still varies across programmes and setting robust and informative performance indicators remains a challenge. In their statement, the auditors however award top grades to H2020 specifically. There are no indications that performance is at risk, they say, and highlight that examples of successful projects are plentiful. The programme provides EU value added through its uniqueness and pan-European character and especially in the first pillar ‘Excellent Science’ many of the indicators are on track to meet their targets.