Vol. 470 No. 1
289 Mr. Moynihan asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Forestry the amount of the £3.5 million in EU funds lost to his Department in each of the years 1994 and 1995 due to delays in making payments which related to the control of farmyard pollution scheme, the cattle headage scheme, the sheep headage scheme, the ewe premium scheme, the suckler cow premium scheme. [18508/96] and the beef premium scheme. [18508/96]
In his annual report on the 1995 Appropriation Accounts, which was published recently, the Comptroller and Auditor General made reference to a sum of approximately £3.5 million which was disallowed by the EU because of payment delays. Of this figure, £169,332 related to the 1993 suckler cow scheme. The remainder related to the extensification scheme — £2,714,282 under the 1993 scheme and £627,189 under the 1994 scheme. The extensification scheme was one of the new measures introduced in 1993 resulting from CAP reform. These new measures resulted in a substantial increase in the number of scheme payments made to farmers in 1993 — 600,000 as compared with 370,000 in 1992 — and involved greater complexity in administration. While additional resources were put in place in the Department, there was some delay in recruiting and training staff and some teething problems with new computer systems. In addition farmers had difficulty in understanding the various new requirements resulting in many errors in applications which took time to sort out. All of these elements were factors in the difficulty in meeting the new payment deadlines in full as set by the European Commission. As an extensification scheme payment could be made to a farmer only after all his other scheme applications had been paid, most of the late payments occurred in this area. My Department is continuing to pursue with the European Commission the matter of securing some EU funding for these extensification payments.
