Tatjana VERRIER

What Tatjana VERRIER has said (4)

• “Now apply it in their own transparency frameworks, and several other EU institutions have already expressed an interest to join, let's say, in that kind of way, applying these rules or using the transparency register. So this set up allows for flexibility. The interinstitutional agreement is a dynamic and flexible legal instrument, leaving room to adapt to the evolving nature and changing forms of lobbying at political level. It has. It has received regular reviews, each time strengthening the underlying framework, especially with council joining in 2021. The agreement is again due for review, as was mentioned by July 25. I also would like to underline the difficulty to compare these two with national models of lobby regulation, which are based on mandatory laws using also sanctions. The EU institution designed the EU Transparency Register as a voluntary register for lobbyists, using a cooperative approach, with registration as a precondition for lobbyists to obtain access to the institutions and to top level decision makers. This has created a de facto obligation for lobbyists to register. So conditionality and a mandatory approach for the institutions to implement these conditionality measures. We strongly believe that the internal measures put in place in the Commission, establishing that all senior decision makers, at political and administrative level, shall only meet registered interest representatives, have provided an effective way of ensuring transparency of its contacts with external stakeholders.”
  Transparency requirements of EU institutions · Transparency requirements for interest groups
• “Thank you very much. So, dear honourable members, dear Honourable Chair, I would like to express my warm thanks for this opportunity to present to you today the Commission's positions on the recommendations of the ECA in its report. The Honourable Member of the court, Mr. Petrovic, thank you very much for presenting the recommendations set out in the report. I would like to underline that the Commission welcomed this audit on the EU Transparency Register. Its recommendations are useful, very useful for what is a visible and important transparency tool, which is the transparency to register the EU Transparency Register is unique. It is operated jointly by three main EU institutions as a joint tool to increase lobby transparency at EU level through a common framework established by an Interinstitutional Agreement and implemented by internal decisions. Decisions of these institutions in this audit Parliament, Council and the Commission's Commission were equal odds from the Commission perspective. The Register has shown remarkable resilience over time and is valued as an example for regulators across the EU, not least for its considerable size and scope, as well as its consistently high rates of registration. So by now we have 13,000 organisations and self-employed organisations registered today, which is quite unique to worldwide. I also would like to underline that the register is a reference for other EU institutions, for example the Committee of Regions and the European Economic and Social Committee.”
  Transparency requirements of EU institutions · Transparency requirements for interest groups
• “Yes. Um, there's very important points that you raise and indeed, I think some, some, some answers Parliament already tried to provide. What what I could perhaps only add is that talking about the NGOs and the financing of NGOs, there is, of course, a financial transparency system that also exists which lists the recipients of the funds. And so what we could uh, do is, is, is to, to see to which extent this information can, can be, can be, uh, you know, somehow linked with the transparency register, no cross checking and so on. Of course, again, requires, you know, resources and budgets and so on. But I think this is a measure that definitely can be considered. And there will be a review, of course, in IEEE as well, where we can bring all these, all these topic topics together. So in general, in our checks, as was already mentioned by Parliament, we have the limitation of the current legal structure clearly and the resources limitations. But nevertheless, next year, in 2025, we plan to focus on our monitoring and review of the quality checks on NGOs and non-commercial entities. So we will try to to review all of them. And to the extent possible, we have seen the limitation of our ability to, let's say, judge whether they correctly entered their status and things like that. We will perform these checks and what you mentioned on the historic data. More specifically, we also realize that it's an issue and we are working on it and next year with a new IT release, we we hope we will fix part of the problem at least. And then we aim in general that this information, historic information will be then in the future available when you search by number or by name, at least you can see that it was registered before or not. So it is clearly one of the limitations right now. Yeah. Okay.”
  Transparency requirements of EU institutions · Regulation of NGOs in Europe · Transparency requirements for interest groups
• “Nonetheless, the Commission is ready to continue to lead by example. This is why the Commission today has adopted the extension of transparency register requirements to all staff, holding management functions down to the head of unit level, and this will be applicable as of 1st of January 2025. This is a considerable step forward in terms of transparency, going beyond the recommendations that recommended to extend this obligation down to the senior management level. So it permits us to strengthen the underlying framework of the transparency register further. Um, so on on other findings, the Commission would like to also underline that Echa's findings are based on statistics from 2022. So over, over already two years ago. Since then, the commission, along with other oddities, Has worked hard to improve several of the issues outlined in the report. Notably in terms of data quality and concerning the website. This is set out in the Commission's reply and in the annual report on the Transparency Register. So our actions are yielding results and we are in a very different situation as regards the transparency register today, as illustrated by by the brand new website and supporting IT tool that enrich enriched with new functionalities to make the registers user friendly and efficient as possible. So I am very happy to provide further details in our upcoming exchange. Thank you.”
  Transparency requirements of EU institutions · Discharge of EU institutions and agencies · Transparency requirements for interest groups