Farm agency chaos hit by new attack from Brussels
"There will not be a single złoty coming to Poland," Dethomas told the Business Journal. "They will not recover a single euro from the European Union."
Bureaucratic incompetence in getting key EU projects under way in the country is beginning to emerge as a major stumbling block in the accession process, despite the general clean bill of health awarded by the Commission. Union officials are said to be dismayed by the lack of urgency shown by their Warsaw counterparts, the absence of clear lines of decision taking inside the agency and the absence of professionalism in organising programmes.
They also condemned the agency's insistence that it required vast numbers of experts to implement important monitoring schemes.
The Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture (ARiMR), where projects vital to the accession process have been retarded by bureaucratic mismanagement and allegations of misspending, has come under sustained attack in Brussels and Poland.
The agency stands accused of cronyism and overall ineptitude in its administration of two unfinished projects crucial to the procurement of EU money, the super-technical Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) and in tendering for the supply of cattle ear tags as part of a European wide monitoring scheme.
Officials responsible for the project disclaimed responsibility for the problems.
"Yes, I understand," said Bogdan Twarowski, the director of the department of the identification and registration of animals, who oversees the tender scheduled for court review this Thursday as well as the veterinary administration for the tagging system.
"I do everything that I have to do," he said. "It's a problem. I push and push all the time for the tenders."
Four of the five contract bidders, two each from France and Germany and one from Denmark, have violated the Polish government's specifications for the tender contracts. Twarow-ski insists he has set a personal deadline of Nov. 1 to have the tender process completed. But he is not yet sure of the next step should this week's offers be rejected.
"The only one thing blocking progress is the tenders," he said. "I have the money." The contracts are worth about €4 million.
Dethomas said that the European Commission is deeply concerned with the sheer complexity of the farm agency's attempts to implement the IT programme to support the IACS project.
Director Aleksander Bentkowski is demanding that Brussels pay for 6,500 employees at the cost of approximately €700 million, while Dethomas insists that large member states be managed with much smaller resources.
But the EU paymasters, are sceptical that the state farm agency is implementing the technology by the simplest route.
"They seem to want to put in place something that's so complicated," he said. "It's more complicated than in any of the member states."
