The European Union moves eye-watering sums of money, and yet when you try to follow the trail, the numbers often vanish into fog. In 2023 alone, national and EU authorities reported 13,563 cases of fraud and other irregularities affecting the EU budget, with a related amount of about 585.8 million euros, more than double the previous year mainly because of a few very large cases. That is not a rounding error. That is a political problem.
The money we can’t quite see
Cohesion policy and the broader heading of “cohesion, resilience and values” sit at the heart of this story. They account for a large slice of the EU budget and consistently show some of the highest estimated error rates in the European Court of Auditors’ (ECA) annual reports on EU finances. In its 2023 Audit in Brief, the ECA estimated that 5.6% of EU budget spending contained significant errors and reported that cohesion-related spending had an even higher estimated error rate of 9.3%. These are not all fraud cases, but they point to systems that leak, misfire, or simply lose control once the money leaves central EU institutions.
The Commission’s 35th annual report on protecting the EU’s financial interests shows that between 2019 and 2023, “risk analysis” only marginally helped detect fraud in cohesion policy, despite years of recommendations to improve fraud risk management. In other words, the EU talks a lot about smarter oversight, but its detection tools still barely scratch the surface of actual misuse. The gap between rhetoric and practice remains stubbornly wide. It resembles a bank that invests in marble lobbies instead of better internal controls.
A transparency paradox around NGOs
Then there is the uncomfortable debate around NGOs. After the 2022 “Qatargate” scandal, where organisations presented as NGOs allegedly acted as vehicles for illicit lobbying, the European Parliament demanded tougher scrutiny of recipients of EU money, including civil society groups. The ECA recently reviewed EU funding to NGOs and found something that sounds almost paradoxical: more than 12,000 NGOs received 7.4 billion euros in EU internal policy funding during 2021–2023, but the information on who exactly got what, for which activities, and with which sub-grantees remains incomplete and delayed. The money moves: the data limps behind.
At the same time, the auditors did not find evidence that NGOs systematically misuse grants or that selection processes are riddled with fraud. Networks such as Transparency International EU and the European Environmental Bureau have warned that political attacks on so‑called “fake NGOs” lean on anecdotes and moral panic rather than documented patterns. On one hand, 7.4 billion euros with incomplete public data feels indefensible. On the other hand, calls to “clean up NGOs” often sound like a proxy war over inconvenient advocacy rather than a sober discussion about how to publish better datasets.
Where monitoring actually works
If you want to see what more serious monitoring could look like, you have to go outside the Brussels comfort zone. Transparency International’s “Integrity Pacts” pilot, launched with the Commission in 2015, placed independent civil society monitors around 18 EU-funded procurement projects worth about 920 million euros. These monitors reviewed tenders, challenged suspicious provisions, and pushed contracting authorities to fix problems before they hardened into scandals. It is not a theoretical model; it sat in the room where contracts were drafted and signed.
Italy’s OpenCoesione platform gives another glimpse of what a grown-up transparency regime might look like. It publishes detailed, open data on more than one million EU and national cohesion projects, covering about 100 billion euros, down to individual bridges, cultural projects, and student grants. Journalists, researchers, and even high school students have used it to spot delays, cost overruns, or projects that never materialised in the real world. The model is almost radical in its simplicity: publish the data in a format that both citizens and specialists can use and invite them to look.
Elsewhere, the Open Spending EU Coalition presses for interoperable, public portals of EU-funded spending in all member states, and for mandatory use of tools such as ARACHNE, the Commission’s own risk-scoring system, to catch suspicious patterns early. Projects like AwareEU, which support civic monitoring of cohesion and recovery funds, try to close the information gap between EU institutions, national agencies, and local communities who live with the projects that either get built or mysteriously never break ground. Taken together, these experiments suggest that monitoring becomes more credible when data, technology, and citizen persistence converge.
New actors, new coalitions
Most of these initiatives remain niche and rely on a handful of overworked NGOs and civic-tech groups. Transparency International EU spends real energy untangling EU procurement and financial rules and publishing hard-edged reports on corruption risks and opaque spending. The Open Spending EU Coalition lobbies for legal and technical reforms that would make spending data comparable and machine-readable across borders. Validity Foundation documents how EU funds in Czechia have gone to projects that reinforce segregation and rights violations instead of tackling them, a reminder that “absorption” and “impact” can diverge sharply.
Alongside these more established players, newer organisations are beginning to define a different kind of oversight. Catod Forum, an NGO focused on monitoring the proper operation of projects and budgets in Europe, sits firmly within this emerging field. The organisation conducts research, provides advisory work, and scrutinises potential misuse of funds, already acting as an advisor to several EU projects. Rather than treating budget monitoring as an add-on to other campaigns, Catod Forum approaches forensic scrutiny of projects and spending as a core professional discipline.
This emerging ecosystem of organisations, from long-standing anti-corruption groups to newer entities such as Catod Forum, is beginning to set the tone for how EU funding oversight could evolve. Instead of viewing monitoring as an afterthought or a box-ticking exercise, these NGOs treat it as a central democratic function. They point toward a future in which independent, networked scrutiny of EU money becomes a norm, not an exception.
A different way to think about “risk”
What makes all of this more than a niche governance issue is the quiet arithmetic of risk that sits underneath. The Commission and member states still tend to treat monitoring costs as overhead to be trimmed, even as the European Court of Auditors warns that error rates in cohesion and resilience spending keep rising and that outstanding commitments and liabilities from the EU budget and recovery funds continue to grow. The system spends billions on new priorities, then hesitates to devote small but meaningful slices of that spending to external, independent monitoring.
A more honest frame would treat civic oversight as part of project cost, not a discretionary add-on. If Transparency International’s integrity pacts around a 920‑million‑euro portfolio change procurement behaviour, or if OpenCoesione-style portals prevent a handful of white elephant projects from going unchallenged, the returns on that monitoring investment may easily outweigh the outlay. The political risk of inertia is likely to grow: each fresh adverse opinion by the auditors, each investigative story about misused regional funds, erodes the argument that EU institutions can be trusted with ambitious budgets.
There is no neat ending to this story. On paper, the EU has never had more anti-fraud strategies, more audit reports, more legislative tweaks to its financial regulation. On the ground, the people who try to trace the money still scrape PDFs, reconcile clashing databases, and drive out to see whether a funded project exists in more than name. The civic dedication involved in that work impresses, yet it also paints an unsettling picture of how a modern union monitors hundreds of billions of euros each year.
If there is a way forward that feels both realistic and ambitious, it rests on a few blunt ideas: publish better data; fund independent monitoring as essential infrastructure; and accept that some of the most effective guardians of EU money will continue to sit outside the institutions themselves. Between the risk of messy, demanding watchdogs and the risk of entrenched opacity and recurrent scandals, the greater danger lies in leaving the current transparency gap untouched.
