Murky water at Onema

One of the principal French water quality agencies has been charged with mismanagement and possible fraudulent contracting.  This comes as as the European Union may assess France with monetary penalties for not meet water quality standards.

The Cours des comptes, the French version of the General Accountability Office, is about to release a report charging that the Office national de l'eau et des milieux aquatique (Onema) has failed to maintain records required under public contracting laws.  More or less at the same time, the union representing Onema employees has filed a legal complaint with charges of fraudulent contracting and pressure on employees to ignore contracting rules.

Onema is a good-sized agency; it employs about 900 people and operates with an annual budget of 110 million euros.  Formally, it's a semi-independent "établissement publique" under the administrative supervision of the Ministry of Ecology.  So far Delphine Batho, the Ecology Minister, has quietly transferred the Onema director and the head of the agency's board of directors.  She also shifted responsibility for the critical water information system (système d'information sur l'eau) from Onema to an agency within the Ministry, the Direction de l'eau et de la biodiversité.

Apart from the alleged individual bad acts, Le Monde suggests the potential for mismanagement and fraud was fostered by Onema's administrative position.  The paper suggests the the ministry's oversight agency, also involved in water quality, was disinclined to strictly oversee a sister agency with whom it shared overlapping objectives.  This may be part of the story, but it sounds incomplete.  It doesn't explain, for example, how Onema also seemed to be able to avoid oversight by management and budget officials at the Ministry of Economy.

The country's slow progress towards meeting E.U. standards most likely has political as well as administrative causes.  And a political one that comes to mind immediately is agriculture.  The French farm industry has been doing all it can to resist stricter rules on pesticides, fertilizers, and farm waste products.