In 2025, OLAF recommended the recovery of €597 million of misused EU funds to the EU budget and prevented €18 million from being unduly spent from the EU budget. The Office concluded 209 cases including recommendations for follow-up to the relevant national and EU authorities. In addition, 254 new investigations were opened after having analysed over 1140 reports on fraud and irregularities. These are the key figures of OLAF's annual report for the year 2025, which was presented on 20 April 2026. It is also available in digital format. For the 2024 report →eucrim 2/2025, 124.

For the first time, OLAF's annual activity report includes recommendations to stakeholders designed to foster a more effective and coordinated approach to combating fraud and irregularities. The report also provides a breakdown of how much OLAF recommended for recovery over the past 10 years. Accordingly, OLAF's recommendations led to the recovery of €5.9 billion and €873 million have been prevented from being unduly spent as a result of OLAF’s investigations between 2016 and 2025.

With regard to the main trends in 2025, OLAF observed the following:

• Most investigations concerning expenditure fraud dealt with manipulation of procurement procedures, conflicts of interest, and inflated invoices. These trends also appeared in the 18 cases investigated linked to the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF);
• Revenue fraud investigation mostly concerned tobacco and e-cigarette smuggling, trade diversion, and evasion of customs duties and VAT. OLAF seized over 427 million illicit cigarettes worldwide, with 219 million cigarettes confiscated at the EU's external borders;
• OLAF conducted several high-profile investigations within the EU institutions. These increasingly involve cooperation with the EPPO. Cases included breaches of ethics rules, harassment, and abuse of teleworking rights.

With regard to anti-fraud policy developments, the report highlights the ongoing review of the European Anti-Fraud Architecture (AFA, →eucrim 2/2025-137-138). This review process aims to improve coordination, efficiency and overall protection of the EU's budget against fraud and irregularities; for OLAF, strengthening cooperation with the EPPO, other EU law enforcement bodies, as well as national authorities and private partners remains key in this context. The report also points out that the AFA review goes hand in hand with the new multiannual financial framework (MFF) that envisages a fundamental overhaul of the EU financial approach and may lead to new challenges for preventing and combating fraud.

With regard to the perspectives of the future anti-fraud approach, OLAF formulates several recommendations, including the following:

• Invest in advanced technologies and data analytics to support investigations and improve the detection of fraud and irregularities;
• Establish a more coordinated and enhanced cooperation between OLAF and the other AFA partners, including secure and direct information exchange;
• Ensure OLAF has full access to the EU Customs Data Hub to facilitate the detection and prevention of customs fraud and other illicit activities;
• Support the strengthening of cooperation between OLAF and the Anti-Money Laundering Agency and the Member States' Financial Intelligence Units;
• Implement a coordinated EU approach to the regulation of e-cigarettes to reduce the difficulties faced by enforcement authorities in combating the illicit trade of e-cigarettes.

In its statement on occasion of the release of the OLAF report 2025, new OLAF Director-General, Petr Klement, emphasised that the Office must be staffed with adequate resources to carry out its mandate properly. Over the last 15 years, OLAF lost 110 permanent position and currently faces a concerning lack of human resources.