EU Court of Auditors: 3.8% of 2025 budget spent irregularly

The news currently comes from a single source (GreenReport, on the annual report by the European Court of Auditors); no independent confirmation is available in the excerpts at hand.

The European Court of Auditors has published its annual report, noting that the estimated error level in EU spending remains too high. The figure, in itself, is not new in nature: every year the oversight body quantifies how much of EU spending fails to fully comply with eligibility or reporting rules. This year the rate rose from 3.6% recorded in 2024 to 3.8% in 2025.

The Court’s overall assessment, however, is not one of alarm about the accounts as a whole: the body concludes that the EU’s accounts for 2025 give a true and fair view of the financial situation, and that revenue is free of error. This is an important distinction, as it separates the judgment on overall accounting quality — which remains positive — from the specific flag on spending irregularities, which concerns in particular the disbursement of funds to final beneficiaries.

The Court’s document also offers a forward-looking figure concerning the Union’s borrowing capacity: loans taken on by Brussels could reach 1,000 billion euros by 2027. This is a figure that measures how much the common debt instrument, born with the post-Covid recovery programme, has become established as an ordinary financing lever rather than an emergency and temporary measure.

The report comes as the Eurogroup and Ecofin are meeting in Luxembourg these same days to discuss, among other things, the energy crisis affecting several member states: two events that intersect without overlapping, one concerning accounting oversight, the other economic-political coordination.

The error rate of 3.8%, although rising compared to the previous year, remains the figure against which the Court will measure the following budget exercise.