Luxembourg: The European Union is preparing to make national anti-fraud strategies compulsory in every member state, part of a wider push to protect the bloc’s budget that prosecutors say now faces criminal damage running into tens of billions of euros. The Commission wants each capital to adopt a written anti-fraud plan and to cooperate far more closely with the EU bodies that chase misused funds.

The urgency comes straight from the numbers. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office, headquartered in Luxembourg, reported that by the end of 2025 it was running 3,602 active investigations, up 35 percent in a year, with an estimated 67.27 billion euros in damage to EU and national budgets. Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi presented those figures to the European Parliament in April and warned that VAT fraud, corruption and money laundering keep climbing.

Brussels plans to answer with a package of anti-fraud and anti-corruption measures before the end of 2026. Officials have signalled an EU anti-corruption strategy, a review of the Union’s anti-fraud architecture, and a revision of the regulation that governs the prosecutor’s office. Together the proposals would tighten the web linking the EPPO, the anti-fraud office OLAF, the police agency Europol and the judicial body Eurojust.

Making national strategies mandatory marks the clearest shift. Until now many governments relied on scattered rules and voluntary plans, leaving obvious gaps for organised crime to exploit as EU spending flows through recovery funds and cohesion programmes. Requiring every country to publish a strategy, and to report on it, hands the Commission a yardstick and a lever it currently lacks.

The prosecutor’s office has its own wish list. It has asked for heavier investment in modern IT systems that can monitor spending in real time, share risk analysis across borders and use artificial intelligence to flag suspicious patterns before the money vanishes. The office argues that its caseload has outgrown its resources, a complaint Transparency International echoed in its review of the 2025 report.

The new drive builds on an anti-corruption directive that entered into force on 31 May 2026 and on the earlier 2023 anti-corruption package. It also feeds the fight over the next long-term budget, where the Commission wants to bind the release of EU money more tightly to how well governments guard it. Leadership will change midway through the effort, with Andrés Ritter taking over as European chief prosecutor from 1 November.

National governments will not accept every idea quietly. Some capitals guard their prosecutors jealously and resist any expansion of EU-level power over criminal justice, a sensitivity that has slowed past reforms. The Commission insists it wants coordination rather than control, and it points to the sheer scale of the losses as reason enough to act.

Readers can track the prosecutor’s caseload and methods through the EPPO’s own published documents and follow the Commission’s wider effort through its anti-corruption network. For now the message from Brussels and Luxembourg lands blunt: the money is leaking, and the EU intends to tighten every seam of its anti-fraud defences.