EU criticises finance ministry for failure to oversee fund distribution

The Czech Republic was the worst country in the EU last year in terms of drawing and reporting European funding, according to the European Commission’s annual report. The document criticizes the Czech finance ministry’s inability to carry out proper checks of money received from the EU’s operational funds. As a result of the ministry’s failure to install a functional system of oversight, recipients and bodies distributing funding made a number of mistakes and even committed fraud, resulting in significant losses for the state budget. The ministry admitted past mistakes, saying that most of them happened because audits were carried out by the institutions that distributed the money, not by the finance ministry itself.