Financial Interests of the Union and Financial Interests of European Scale

The protection of EU financial interests related to ESI funds lays on three pillars: effectiveness, coordination, and cooperation between competent authorities (art. 325 TFEU). Contrasting irregularities, frauds, and corruption require a balanced set of preventive and remedying legal measures that act as a deterrent and afford adequate protection. Nowadays, the EU legal framework is based on an extensive array of remedying and sanctioning (ex-post) mechanisms, safeguarding the financial interests of the EU: not by chance, the EU Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) aims to improve the criminal law enforcement, as well as the proposal to enhance OLAF cooperation along with EPPO to support the effectiveness of investigations, or the system (EDES) established by the European Commission to reinforce the protection of such interests by ensuring sound financial management, and to keen administrative sanction procedures and exclusion processes against fraudsters. In sum, the most recent evolution of the EU legal framework shows valuable progress in remedying and sanctioning mechanisms. However, preventive legal protection is not yet sufficient under EU law, partly recognized by the 2019 Commission Anti-fraud strategy. Of course, EU authorities may carry out on-the-spot controls and reviews on the Member States managing authorities during external inspections. Regarding coordination and cooperation between authorities, even though it facilitates cooperation and information exchange, the EU system (AFCOS) is still mainly focused on ex-post measures and procedures (investigation). Prevention mechanisms are basically left at a mere advisory level, according to the role played by COCOLAF. It follows from such a complex framework that the need to investigate more robust coordination mechanisms between European and National managing authorities owing to boost cooperation in establishing preventive administrative measures.