The often billion-euro contributions of the EU countries for the common budget are based on partly uncertain calculations. This emerges from a special report published by the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg on Thursday. According to this, the statistical office Eurostat did not check certain aspects that could most likely require adjustments in a targeted manner. As a result, individual countries could face additional payments.
The basis for determining the contribution payments is data on gross national income, which is periodically checked by Eurostat. According to the Court of Auditors, 300 questions remained open in the form of so-called reservations in the last audit cycle 2016-2019. Around a quarter of these concerned four Member States that had been classified as high-risk countries by the statistical office but were not given priority attention.
An example of a risk affecting gross national income and thus the basis for calculating EU contributions is the relocation of operations or assets of large corporations.
Each EU country pays a certain percentage of its gross national income to the EU budget. In 2021, this was 29.6 billion euros for Germany as the largest payer, followed by France (20.3 billion euros) and Italy (14.5 billion euros).