Luxembourg: The building on Rue Erasme that houses the European Public Prosecutor’s Office has been operational since June 2021, long enough for the institution to stop being an experiment and start being a subject of assessment. The Commission published that assessment today, and it did not arrive alone. A second evaluation, covering the European Anti-Fraud Office, was released in the same package.
Pairing them was deliberate. The two bodies were designed to be complementary rather than overlapping: OLAF conducts administrative investigations and issues recommendations that national or EU authorities may act upon, while the EPPO holds genuine criminal competence over offences against the Union budget in the twenty-four participating member states. In practice the boundary has been less clean than the architecture suggested, and anyone who has watched a case pass between the two will have noticed the seams.
The verdict on the EPPO is favourable in substance. The evaluation, the first since operations began, concludes that the office has produced meaningful results in protecting EU spending, with the clearest gains in complex cross-border matters where a single prosecutorial authority avoids the coordination costs that used to sink such files. The hybrid design — a central college in Luxembourg working through European Delegated Prosecutors embedded in national systems — is judged to have worked. That is a non-trivial finding, because the hybrid was a political compromise before it was an institutional theory, and there was no guarantee that a prosecutor sitting in a national courthouse under national procedural law would function as part of a European body.
The problems the evaluation identifies are mostly the problems of a young institution operating through twenty-four different legal orders. The Regulation contains ambiguities that member states have resolved in divergent ways. National implementation varies enough that a Delegated Prosecutor in one country works with investigative powers a counterpart elsewhere does not have. Information exchange with other actors — customs authorities, tax administrations, OLAF itself — is described as difficult. And the support the office receives from national authorities is uneven, which in a system that relies entirely on national police forces for investigative capacity is not a technical complaint.
There is also a measurement problem. The evaluation calls for stronger evidence on outcomes and recoveries, which is a polite way of saying that the office cannot yet demonstrate, in figures that would satisfy a budgetary authority, how much money its work has actually returned to the Union. Indictments and convictions are countable. Recovered funds depend on national enforcement that happens after the EPPO’s file closes.
That gap matters because of what comes next. The Commission opened a review of the whole anti-fraud architecture with a White Paper in 2025, and the two evaluations published today are its evidence base. A Communication is expected later this year, and it may be accompanied by proposals to amend the EPPO Regulation, the OLAF Regulation and the PIF Directive — the three instruments that between them define how the Union investigates and prosecutes fraud against its own budget.
The timing is not accidental either. The next multiannual financial framework, covering 2028 to 2034, restructures how EU money is disbursed, with a greater share flowing through national plans rather than the Commission’s own programmes. Performance-based disbursement shifts the fraud risk toward the point where funds are claimed rather than where they are spent, and the existing architecture was designed for a different model. Whatever the Communication proposes, it will be read against that change.
For the EPPO, the evaluation is closer to a mandate for more than a warning. Its recurring complaint has been resources and national cooperation, and a Commission document saying the same thing in its own voice is useful ammunition. Whether it converts into a revised Regulation, or into a budget line, is the question the autumn will answer.
