European Court of Auditors. Special report 11/2025: Transparency of EU funding granted to NGOs – Despite progress, the overview is still not reliable.

Transparency gives citizens the information they need to hold public decision-makers to account. NGOs play an important role in EU policy-making. We assessed the transparency of EU funding granted to NGOs in EU internal policies. We found, that despite improvements, the transparency of EU funding granted to NGOs has been hampered by inconsistent classification of NGOs and issues impacting data quality. We also found that the Commission and other bodies do not proactively check recipients’ compliance with EU values, and that certain advocacy activities were funded by the Commission in a way that was not fully transparent. We recommend that the Commission classify NGOs consistently, improve the quality of EU spending data, and actively verify compliance with EU values.