Overview Of Member States’ Replies

• Year: 2022

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Overall, they assessed the impact of this digitisation as boosting fraud prevention and detection, as well

as simplifying administrative procedures. Markedly countries like Finland, which relied on non-EU

tools, reported that the potential burden of adjusting domestic data protection law to accommodate the

use of, for example, ARACHNE was keeping them from doing so.

1.4. Strengthening Fraud Risk Analysis

Under the 2021-2027 MFF and NextGenerationEU, the 2021 PIF Report more broadly, too,

recommended to proactively approach the protection of the EU’s financial interests. Such an approach

would encompass using data from all available sources, analysing the data and exchanging information,

including with law enforcement authorities and the Commission to specify emerging risks and fraud

trends timely. Member States should further act on information provided by the Commission and

feedback promptly on the actions taken in response.

In 2022, 14 Member States considered that they had implemented this recommendation in full,

reiterated their proactive approach to combatting fraud against the EU budget and presented recent

initiatives. On the revenue side, these Member States highlighted the Financial Risks Criteria and

Standards (FRC) Implementing Decision, supporting national and EU level IT Tools such as the

Customs Risk Management System (CRMS)

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and the Anti-Fraud Information System (AFIS), which

helped tax and customs authorities to mine and enrich data from a variety of sources and to exchange

data among Member States and with the EU institutions. On the expenditure side, Member States

highlighted certain context-specific fraud risk management systems developed by EU fund managing

authorities, as well as top-level coordination, IT tools like ARACHNE, and dedicated trainings.

Member States that indicated only partial compliance (12) with the advice to strengthen their fraud risk

analyses reported similar measures, but had, to date, not implemented these for revenue and

expenditure. Sometimes, as was the case for Germany, the extent to which this recommendation was

implemented varied by governance level and amongst states due to the Member State’s competence

distribution.

Only Sweden is still to implement this recommendation, while Ireland and Czechia did not report on it.

In this context, it is also noteworthy that Member States such as Finland, which had only partially

implemented the Commission recommendation, pointed to a high burden stemming from administering

and legislatively accommodating tools such as ARACHNE into its domestic data protection framework.

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CRMS is a European electronic system for customs, financed by the EU Customs Progra mme. CRMS2,

the new release of the system, started to operate on 1 January 2022