The Search for Supra‐National Solutions: Investigating Fraud against the European Budget

Fraud against the Community budget requires a supranational response because it is an area in which organised crime groups work on a cross‐border basis. The paper considers some of the difficulties confronting the mounting of such a supra‐national response: the inbuilt character of fraud on the Community budget, given the nature of the organisation; difficulties with information technology; the scale of the problem; the lack of prioritisation of the issue by Member States; corruption within the political establishments of Member States; and legal problems. The paper concludes with an examination of the available models for operational cooperation in the fight against fraud: the K4 Commission set up under the Maastricht Treaty, the SIRENE bureaux, Interpol, Europol and UCLAF, the Commission's own anti‐fraud unit. National police investigators have anyway set up their own cross‐border networks to combat the changing modes of cross‐border crime; but all this raises questions about national sovereignty and accountability.