The European Commission still cannot be certain that EU countries have effective systems to ensure that the EU’s €650 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) complies with public procurement and state aid rules. This is the main message of the European Court of Auditor's (ECA) special report 09/2025 entitled: "Systems for ensuring compliance of RRF spending with public procurement and state aid rules - Improving but still insufficient". The report was published on 10 March 2025 and complements previous reports on the control system of the RRF (the EU's new funding model to overcome the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic), such as the special report 07/2023 on the design of the Commission’s control system for the RRF (→ eucrim 1/2023, 25-26) and special report 22/2024 on the risk of double funding from the EU budget (→ eucrim 3/2024, 185).

For the present report, the ECA assessed the RRF control systems at Commission and EU Member State level, asking as to whether the Commission has been able to draw sufficient assurance that Member State internal control systems are effective in ensuring that RRF-funded measures complied with public procurement and state aid rules.

ECA's auditors found that EU countries had weaknesses when it came to checking public procurement compliance. Problems have existed in relation to the coverage, quality and/or timing of checks. As far as state aid is concerned, national RRF audit bodies generally had no assurance on state aid when payment requests were submitted. A main issue resulting in the detected shortcomings are unclear rules, as EU countries were given no detailed guidance on how to check EU public procurement and state aid rules. Although the Commission has improved its audit strategy since the initial phase of RRF implementation, ECA's auditors still found problems. For instance, not all EU countries that received RRF funding were checked with the same degree of detail for public procurement control and audit systems. Another issue are shortcomings in the recovery of misspent EU money, which, as the report stresses, is also due to the design of the RRF where payments are solely based on the satisfactory fulfilment of milestones and targets.

Based on its findings, the ECA provides several recommendations for the Commission to ensure compliance with public procurement and state aid rules and improve control and audit systems in this area.