EU EUPHEMISMS

The EU's accounting is much improved but it's still a joke:

For the eleventh year in a row, the European Union's annual accounts have failed to gain a seal of approval from the EU's own auditors.

The European Court of Auditors said the amount of spending they could verify rose to 35% in 2004 from 6% in 2003.

The improvement was mainly due to a new system of control over the payment of agricultural subsidies to farmers.

But the auditors said the vast majority of spending was still affected by "errors of legality and regularity".

The BBC's Jonny Dymond in Brussels says once again the shadow of fraud and mismanagement has been cast over the EU's budget process.

The auditors' report said more than a third of EU farm spending did not "provide the Commission with reasonable assurance of compliance... with Community legislation."

It also pointed out that a lot of EU spending is "high risk", in that you have to rely on people spending it as they have promised to.

See, Europeans aren't always risk averse.