The achievement of the objectives included in the national Recovery and Resilience Plan has not been monitored and reported on in such a manner that it would be possible to monitor and assess the overall effectiveness of the Plan's implementation. Therefore, the results of the implementation of the Plan cannot be verified, either.
The audit was targeted at the funding that Finland has received from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) and that has been allocated for the purposes defined in the Sustainable Growth Programme for Finland and the national Recovery and Resilience Plan. The objective of the EU’s RRF is to speed up the recovery of people, the economy and society from the Covid-19 crisis.
The authorities responsible for the management of the funds have complied with the EU rules applying to the funds paid from the RRF and national legislation. The administrative framework is complex, but the roles and responsibilities of the different actors are quite clearly defined in legislation. The risk of error is increased by the fact that the data to be reported to the EU Commission have been transferred mainly manually to the centralised information system, and it has not been possible to build automatic controls for the data transfer.
According to the audit, the common indicators of the EU’s RRF reflect only a small number of Finland’s national objectives. The achievement of the national objectives has not been monitored and reported on in such a manner that it would be possible to monitor and assess the effectiveness of the implementation of the national objectives included in Finland’s Sustainable Growth Programme and Recovery and Resilience Plan in all respects. Therefore, the overall effectiveness of the implementation of the Plan cannot be monitored and the results of the implementation of the Plan cannot be verified, either. In addition, there are challenges in managing the performance of projects financed by the support authorities, which are related to defining the goals and indicators of the projects, planning the implementation of the projects and verifying their effectiveness.
The National Audit Office recommends that the Ministry of Finance should ensure that the monitoring, reporting and ex-post evaluation of the Recovery and Resilience Plan and the achievement of the national objectives are carried out in a way to provide an overall picture of the achievement of the objectives.
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