The van Buitenen paper, published on his website on 5 March, identifies contracts provided to assistants through a service provider as those which bear the highest risk of manipulation, because they remain vague regarding the tasks the assistants are supposed to fulfil.
For instance, no clause limits the monthly payments that can be made to a single contractor. The MEP's summary reveals a case in which a single assistant received a total salary of €15,496, provided through a service provider, which is the monthly amount every MEP receives to pay his staff.
In addition, the report lists cases in which payments were made to a service provider carrying out activities without any relation to the Parliament's activities, such as the timber trade, or where the organisation serving as a service provider in fact belonged to the MEP himself.
Among the 167 payments studied, the internal auditor also claimed to have found 42 'lay-off' payments, applicable in cases where the assistants had to leave because their MEP did not get re-elected. One assistant, for instance, received lay-off payments amounting to almost €9,000, accumulating payments received from 12 different MEPs during his three-month notice period.
The report also looked into 21 so-called 'one-off' payments. For 18 of these no documentation was provided and in five cases, the payments accounted for between three and 19 times the monthly salary of a single MEP. In one case, payments were made without deducting tax or social security.
