Two numbers explain why Europe’s anti-fraud reform has stalled in the same place for a decade. Between 2022 and 2024 the European Anti-Fraud Office recommended that 615 million euro be recovered to the EU budget. Twenty-three million came back. Everything else in the current debate sits downstream of that gap.
The figures come from the European Court of Auditors, which published special report 18/2026 on the Commission’s anti-fraud strategy on 18 June. The title does the summarising: comprehensive yet insufficiently ambitious. Auditors found that the strategy covers the right ground but that the action plans hanging off it rarely commit anyone to a measurable result. The 2019 objectives were never mapped one-to-one onto the actions meant to deliver them, so progress cannot be traced even in principle.
The report lands two further findings that officials tend to describe as technical and that are not. Commission departments do not consistently act on OLAF’s comments, and some issues raised were simply left unresolved. Information exchange between the bodies that detect fraud and the ones that act on it still leaks, and Commission oversight of that exchange has gaps. Neither weakness requires new legislation to fix. Both have survived several rounds of promised improvement.
OLAF’s own account of 2025 reads more confidently. Its annual report published in April recorded recommendations covering close to 600 million euro, another 18 million stopped before it was spent, 209 investigations closed and 254 opened. Over the past decade the office puts the total retrieved or protected at roughly 6.8 billion euro. Its casework ranged across procurement manipulation, conflicts of interest, inflated costs, customs violations and environmental fraud.
Reconcile the two documents and the picture clarifies. OLAF investigates well and recommends promptly. Recovery is not its job. Money comes back only when a national authority or a Commission spending department issues and enforces a demand, and those actors answer to their own timetables, their own courts, and their own political incentives. A recommendation is an invoice that nobody is obliged to pay quickly.
This is the problem the anti-fraud architecture review was supposed to address. The Commission opened it with a white paper in July 2025 and confirmed in late July this year that it wants mandatory national anti-fraud strategies and firmer reporting duties on member states, alongside a review of the laws governing OLAF, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, Eurojust, Europol, Eurofisc and the PIF Directive. The stated aim is deterrence and fewer duplicated efforts across prevention, detection, investigation, correction and recovery.
Timing is the quiet argument here. The review runs alongside negotiations on the next multiannual financial framework, and the Commission wants the anti-fraud settlement agreed before the spending rules are locked. That sequencing is deliberate. Conditionality written into the budget regulation binds capitals in a way that a strategy document never will. Miss the window and the reform becomes a communication that member states read and file.
Parliament’s budgetary control committee will press on the recovery rate rather than the investigation count, because the recovery rate is the one figure that survives contact with a taxpayer. Member states will resist anything that turns their national strategies into a compliance obligation policed from outside. That fight is the real content of the file, and it will not be settled by better coordination between agencies.
One test will tell whether the reform worked. If the next audit shows recommended amounts and recovered amounts converging, the architecture changed. If the ratio stays where the auditors found it, Europe will have rebuilt the machinery around a bottleneck it left in place.
