Eleven Budgets, One Template: Cost Structure and the Limits of Separate Accounting in EU-Funded Local Government Projects
Eleven Budgets, One Template: Cost Structure and the Limits of Separate Accounting in EU-Funded Local Government Projects

Summary/Abstract: Beneficiaries of European Union funding must keep a separate accounting record for each project, and the content of that record is fixed by the structure of the approved budget. This paper asks how much of the project ledger is decided before implementation begins, by examining eleven budgets prepared at the same time, for the same call, by eleven Romanian rural municipalities assisted by the same consultant. The approved eligible budgets, worth 54.42 million lei in total and containing 294 budget lines, are analysed using category shares, coefficients of variation, a concentration index and an exact reconciliation of the flat-rate indirect cost line. Personnel absorbs 61.8 per cent of the eligible budget on average with a coefficient of variation of 0.043, and indirect costs equal 15.00 per cent of direct personnel cost in every project, the largest deviation being 0.00006 percentage points. The 294 lines take only 93 distinct values; four of them recur in at least ten budgets and account for between 22.8 and 24.4 per cent of each budget in which they appear. The dispersion that remains is concentrated in equipment, whose share runs from zero to 6.8 per cent, and one municipality replaced capital acquisition with an operating lease. A standardised budget therefore produces a standardised ledger. That lowers the cost of compliance for small administrations and makes verification faster, but it also means that the separate record documents the template as much as the transaction, which tells internal control where its attention is best spent.

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