Checklists and magnifying glasses

The common vision of Financial Unit´s work may be persons sitting in chambers with magnifying glasses and eagerly looking for errors and mistakes. That view is quite true except we have no magnifying glasses and we aren´t happy to find ineligible expenditures or anything negative. Financing controllers are not against persons working on projects. We are working on ENPI CBC programme where the second C stands for cooperation. That´s what we want to do – co-operate. Our main goal is to help you to implement your project efficiently and legally. By helping project´s to obey the programme rules the major harms in future can be avoided. 

First call projects have proceeded well. Five of them have received their first interim payment orders. Auditing process is new for everyone. There has been some confusion of how accurate expenditure verification process must be. Auditing work in ENPI programmes differs from traditional auditing process. Checking process must extend also to contents of projects and auditors e.g. have to evaluate whether expenditures have incurred by project.

For us working in JMA´s financial unit the checklists are one of the most important tools. You may wonder the meaning of checklists but hopefully have found them useful. There are several details to take into account when drawing up payment request and financial report. It is desirable that checklists will help both Lead Partners and Auditors to make sure that all necessary information has been gathered and taken into consideration when drawing up reports to JMA.

There is lots of space for comments in checklists.  However use of comments is uncommon. It would be illuminating if here and there was something written down. It doesn´t need to be negative but comments can be something that confirms things are going the way they are supposed to. We want to challenge to use comment field boldly.

Programme has been started quite calmly and we have had an opportunity to polish off the report model during the spring. We hope you find financial report easy to fill and will contact us if any questions appear.

Jarkko Kärkimaa

EU Financing Controller