FAILURES of management and control in the member-states' administration of European social funding and of proper Commission targeting of objectives are criticised severely by the EU's Court of Auditors. The EU spent some £22 billion on social policies between 1990 and 1995, the bulk on education and training programmes.

The court's annual report delivers a harsh judgment on the programmes of the Directorate General for Social Affairs under the Irish Commissioner, Mr Padraig Flynn. But Mr Flynn can take some comfort from the fact that most of the criticism is aimed at the member-states, where it perceives serious management problems both in terms of monitoring of programmes and their evaluation.

The report finds a serious level of under-use of funds in the 1994-1995 period due to "a mismatch between the programming and management capacities of the Commission and the member-states".

And it points in evidence to the rise by two-thirds to £800,000 in the value of frozen programmes at the end of February 1996 - programmes are frozen when the Commission finds an irregularity in either eligibility or payment records.

The report records that of the 851 operational programmes for 1990-1993 only 37 per cent had filed complete accounts by the start of 1996. But it also criticises the Commission for delays of, on average, six-and-a-half months in processing applications for grants. Internal supervision by member states is also criticised. The auditors warns that the current system provides no incentive to member-states to get their act together and urges the withholding of future grants to persistent offenders, a practice already used in the farm budget.

The report also delivers a broadside against the very limited spending by Mr Flynn on poverty. Currently the focus of considerable long-running controversy because of the blocking by the British and Germans of the Poverty IV programme, the court condemns ad-hoc payments by Mr Flynn's department to individual poverty projects as being without legal base.