EU Probes Spanish Officials as Concerns on Budget Data Escalate
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European Union officials made an extraordinary visit to Spain in September that signals escalating concern about the reliability of the country’s budget data.
EU statisticians ordered a so-called ad-hoc visit, a procedure reserved for urgent issues, to assess whether regional officials are complying with recommendations after failing to report all the unpaid bills they had accumulated in 2011, Tim Allen, a Luxembourg-based press officer for the statistics agency Eurostat, said in an e-mail. The visit included meetings with officials from Valencia and Madrid regions.