At that time the ECA was not a formal institution; it was an external body designed to audit the finances of the European Communities.

[4] The primary role of the ECA is to externally check if the budget of the European Union has been implemented correctly and that EU funds have been spent legally and with sound management.

[10] As the body is independent, its members are free to decide their own organisation and rules of procedure, although these must be ratified by the Council of the European Union.

[12] The ECA is supported by a staff of approximately 800 auditors, translators and administrators recruited as part of the European Civil Service.

The duties of the President (which may be delegated) are to convene and chair the meetings of the ECA, ensuring that decisions are implemented and the departments (and other activities) are soundly managed.

The previous presidents were Sir Norman Price (elected in 1977, United Kingdom), Michael Murphy (1977, Ireland), Pierre Lelong (1981, France), Marcel Mart (1984, Luxembourg), Aldo Angioi (1990, Italy), André Middelhoek (1992, Netherlands), Bernhard Friedmann (1996, Germany), Jan O. Karlsson (1999, Sweden), Juan Manuel Fabra Vallés † (2002, Spain), Hubert Weber (2006, Austria), and Vítor Manuel da Silva Caldeira (2007, Portugal).

ECA staff are mainly officials recruited via the reserve lists from general competitions organised by the European Personnel Selection Office external link (EPSO).

[citation needed] This has led to media reports of the EU accounts being "riddled with fraud", where issues are based on errors in paperwork even though the underlying spending was legal.

[19] Terry Wynn, an MEP who served on the Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control and reached the position of chairman, has also backed these calls, stating that it is impossible for the Commission to achieve these standards.

In the US, the focus is on the financial information, not on the legality and regularity of the underlying transactions, 'So, other than in Europe, the political reaction in the US to the failure to obtain a clean audit opinion is only "a big yawn"'.

[20] By comparison, the Comptroller and Auditor General for the United Kingdom stated that there were 500 separate accounts for the UK, and "in the last year, I qualified 13 of the 500.

In previous reports, the ECA has noted that "Regardless of the method of implementation applied, the Commission bears the ultimate responsibility for the legality and regularity of the transactions underlying the accounts of the European Communities (Article 274 of the Treaty)".

Owing to the one-member-per-state system, its College of Members grew from nine to twenty-eight as of 2013 (twenty-seven after completing of the United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union/Brexit on 31 January 2020[21][22]).

Attempting to get consensus in the body has thus become more difficult; this led to the number of its special reports per year shrinking from fifteen to six between 2003 and 2005, despite its staff growing by 200 over the same period.