Have you ever filled out a tax return and left blank the boxes in which you are supposed to spell out your income?

Of course not. If you tried, the tax inspector would take one look at your form and demand that you gave him the figures.

Imagine if you then told him that, not only had you not got the slightest idea how much money you had received, you had no idea how you had spent it, couldn’t care less where it went, and couldn’t be bothered to co-operate with his attempts to find out.

And then imagine that you had said and done the same thing for each of the past eleven years.

You would, by now, be behind bars.

Not, however, if you are one of the EU officials responsible for keeping track of the £70 billion annual EU budget which, as taxpayers, we hand over every year.
Not once since 1994 has the European Court of Auditors, the body appointed to oversee the EU’s accounts, been able to sign off the previous year’s figures as being accurate.

Indeed, questioned at the publication of the last report, the chief auditor said, matter of factly, that he could only properly account for five per cent of the total EU budget.

Yesterday, the auditors published - for the eleventh successive year - a report bemoaning the EU’s lax accounting procedures and inaccurate figures.

With accountants’ understatement, the report says this: “As in the past, in 2004 the accounting system cannot ensure that all assets and liabilities are recorded…For the remainder of payments' budget - agricultural spending, structural measures, internal policies and external action - the Court is again not in a position to provide an unqualified opinion on the legality and regularity of underlying transactions”.

Translated from the jargon into reality, what that means is that the EU is so riddled with corruption that the auditors can’t even begin to say that they know where the money’s gone. Since the UK’s annual contribution to the EU budget is around £11 billion pounds, that means that a lot of the stolen money comes from UK taxpayers.

Dig into the pages of the past eleven years’ reports and the scale of the fraud becomes truly shocking.

As they reveal, the Italians’ favourite scam – claiming money for non-existent olive farms (there aren’t enough olive trees in the whole of Italy to cover a fraction of the subsidies claimed) – is spreading: “In Austria, the extent of eligible Alpine pasture was overestimated by more than 60 per cent”. Thirty per cent of Greek subsidy grants are for maize which has never existed.

On and on it goes, paragraph after paragraph of mind-bogglingly brazen fraud.
On the rare occasions when ‘on the spot’ checks were carried out by inspectors, they found fraud or error in 25 per cent of farm aid in Italy, 23 per cent in Greece, 21 per cent in Spain and 14 per cent in France. And that, of course, was merely those they could inspect.

Here’s a suggestion. If it looks like being an expensive Christmas, don’t worry: there’s an easy way to pay for it. There’s free money available, no questions asked (literally) from the EU taxpayer. All you need to do is pluck an imaginary name out of thin air, dream up an imaginary farm, conjure up some imaginary produce, and heh presto. Fill out a few forms, work out how much subsidy you want and the money is yours.

Oh, and if you think it’s just foreigners who are on the take, here’s what the auditors had to say in the agriculture section last year: “The errors found by the court…chiefly involved discrepancies between, on the one hand, records kept by the farmer and, on the other hand, the declaration on which premiums had been paid. The largest errors of this kind related to payments made in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.”

You might think that the Eurocrats responsible for this would feel, at the very least, ashamed. It is the European Commission, after all, which is charged with overseeing the efficient running of the EU’s structures.

Think again. Instead of shouldering responsibility, they argue that because the report shows that 80% of EU spending is conducted by national and regional authorities, it is Member States which should shoulder responsibility for this giant financial free for all, not the Commission. It is not the EU itself which is to blame, they say, but the governments which comprise it.

Up to a point, they are right. The Commission can only do so much. It is governments which authorise and hand out these corrupt payments and are happy to turn a blind eye to theft.

But only up to a point. The fundamental problem is that the Commission encourages, by its behaviour and ethos, precisely the corruption which needs to be stamped out. One need only look at the behaviour of Neil Kinnock, the former Vice President of the Commission, to see that.

Lord Kinnock, as he is now, was previously the EU Commissioner charged with stamping out corruption.

If his record in that job is anything to go by, one can only thank heavens for the sagacity of the British electorate in twice rejecting his attempt to become Prime Minister.

As the Commissioner responsible for taking action against EU corruption, he certainly acted decisively. He sacked two high level employees: Marta Andreasen, the Commission’s own chief accountant; and another employee, Paul van Buitenen, whose revelations of corruption within the Commission itself led to the scandal which forced the mass resignation of the Commission and its then President, Jacques Santer, in 1999.

Just one problem: Ms Andreasen and Mr van Buienen were not the fraudsters. They were the whistleblowers.

Ms Andreasen discovered within months of starting her job that the Commission’s book-keeping was “out of control” and “shambolic” - as bad as Enron’s, as she put it.

The Commission knew exactly how to react to such a finding. First, Lord Kinnock transferred her to the EU’s Siberia, the personnel and administration department; then he suspended her. Mr Buitenen had similar treatment.

To date, the only two people to have lost their jobs as a result of the widespread EU fraud are Ms Andreasen and Mr van Buitenen. That was Lord Kinnock’s strategy for dealing with fraud: sack the whistleblowers.

Every year we go through the same farce. The auditors publish their report, and the Commission responds by saying that things are getting better, and will be better next year. Next year comes, and the same thing happens. On and on it goes.

The damning truth is that ending EU fraud is like removing wood from trees. They are two sides of the same coin. From Commissioners who see their job not as rooting out fraud but as defending the indefensible, to farmers who milk the EU taxpayer for as much as they can get, the whole edifice of the EU is built on the understanding that there will be a free ride for those who know how to play the system.

But whether it’s subsidies for growing real food and then letting it rot, or the fraud highlighted in the auditors’ reports, someone has to pay.

There is, of course, no such thing as a free ride. The someone who ends up paying for all of it is you.