Providing useful legal tools to help member States tackling frauds in European agricultural subsidies

The current European legal framework establishes rules on checks and reporting of irregularities and suspected frauds in agricultural matters, but evaluation strategies and tools for detecting red flags still highly vary among Member States. This lack in uniformity undermines cooperation among national and supranational investigative bodies, as well as horizontal cooperation among Member States themselves.

AFRADE project, funded by EUAF Project Grants and University of Pisa, aims at specifically responding to this lack of uniformity improving the analytical capability in agri-fraud detection at supranational level and the fight against fraudulent schemes that significantly affect EU financial interests. To this end, AFRADE shall provide a comparative survey on detection and reporting of frauds in EU agricultural shared management funds in five critical member States (Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and Slovakia) as a starting point for drafting a common standard of rules on assessment of fraud risks (guidelines). The expected output of the the project is thus the enhancement of both horizontal and vertical cooperation in cross-border agri-fraud investigations as incitement for future legislative harmonization proposals: a final goal which fully agrees with the current Green-Deal policy for a more sustainable and safe agricultural sector.