An inside angle on how MEPs abused allowances

How the rules have since been changed

The 2008 report led to a widespread overhaul of way the MEP expenses and allowances system is operated. A new employment and payment system for assistants came into force in July 2009.

It did away with a proliferation of complex and often ill-defined rules, replacing them with a single set of common rules for all assistants. MEPs' assistants who work in the Parliament are employed directly by the institution, not by MEPs or by their chosen contracted paying-agents as was the case prior to 2009. Brussels-based assistants also come under a single salary grading and social benefits system similar to the system applying to officials at EU institutions.

Those assistants employed in local constituency offices are paid by officially sanctioned paying agents. Those agents will have to make sure that the contracts meet all national tax and social security requirements. All assistants' contracts will also start and end automatically at the end of the MEPs' terms in office. MEPs remain free to choose whom they hire and what tasks they give to assistants.

The new rules also bar MEPs from paying out the allowance themselves. The allowance, which currently stands at €21,209 per month, is managed instead by the Parliament's administration, not by the MEPs as was previously the case. Any unspent funds from the allowances are returned to the Parliament.

The 2009 rules also ban MEPs from hiring close family members such as spouses or children. However, for those MEPs re-elected in 2009 and who had hired relatives prior to that time, a phase-out period up to 2014 is envisaged.

The Galvin report showed that controls on invoices and expense slips were not stringent enough to prevent some MEPs from abusing the system and pocketing funds for themselves.

So rules on expenses that MEPs incur have also changed as part of a new pay-and-perks system introduced for MEPs in 2009. MEPs are now subject to more rigorous checks on their expenses to ensure that they are correctly invoiced. MEPs may submit expense claims only for actual costs incurred.

Man with a mission: Ciarán Toland

Ciarán Toland, the Irish lawyer who forced the European Parliament to publish the Galvin audit report, said that he hoped its release would set a precedent in allowing the public greater access to Parliamentary documents.

“As reprehensible as some of the disclosures in the report are, the issue is not expenses,” said Toland. “The issue is whether the public has access.”

Toland filed an access request to see the internal audit report in June 2008, but was turned down by the Parliament's secretariat, which claimed that releasing the sensitive document would harm attempts under way at the time to reform the Parliamentary allowances system.

He took his case against the Parliament to the European Court of Justice and, on 7 June, its General Court ruled that the Parliament's reasons for keeping the report confidential were unjustified and that it should be published.

Toland slammed the Parliament's secretariat for withholding the report, which he said could have led to more extensive reforms if MEPs had known its full contents earlier.

According to Toland, MEPs were kept in the dark by their own staff. The MEPs “in turn voted on reforms to the system without knowledge of the [audit] report”. He said that an elected Parliament had no right to hide its finances from its electorate. Transparency was an aid in the decision-making process, Toland added.