The expense payments of €4,416 per month are given to MEPs as a lump sum in addition to their regular pre-tax monthly salary of €8,611 | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images MEPs reject scrutiny of their expenses Legislators do not have to account for how they spend over €50K a year.

STRASBOURG — MEPs on Monday rejected long-awaited proposals to tighten the rules around how elected representatives use the so-called General Expenditure Allowance (GEA), a controversial additional payment that MEPs can use for office and other expenses.

At a late, behind-closed doors meeting, the Parliament’s governing body voted down modest proposals to introduce some accountability into the way legislators can use the money. Currently MEPs do not have to retain any records or tell their constituents what the cash is spent on.

The proposals blocked by the 15-member bureau, which includes the Parliament's President Antonio Tajani, would have required MEPs keep their GEA receipts, have these checked by an external auditor or even publish this information. They also rejected a proposed plan to have members pay back any unused funds to Parliament at the end of their term in office "at latest."

"It's tragically short-sighted that MEPs led by the [center-right European People's Party] have voted against more transparency and accountability around how they spend nearly €40 million a year,” said Heidi Hautala, a vice president of the European Parliament from the Green party. “The fact that some members of the Bureau have just voted to maintain the status quo shows that certain political groups are not listening to everyday people's concerns about how tax-payers money is being spent."

The expense payments of €4,416 per month are given to MEPs as a lump sum in addition to their regular pre-tax monthly salary of €8,611. They are not required to provide any proof of how the money is spent — mainly in their home constituency.

A plan to reform the controversial expense allowance for MEPs had been in the works for months and was submitted to the bureau by the GEA working party of MEPs. In 2017, members stepped up pressure on the administration by adopting a series of reports urging more transparency. That led the secretariat to set up an ad-hoc working group to look at revising the list of expenses included in the GEA.

An investigation by a consortium of investigative journalists called “The MEPs Project” in 2017 found widespread abuses of the system, including rent payments to national political parties or to MEPs’ personal accounts. In many cases it was impossible to find out how the money was spent by lawmakers.

The initial text submitted to the bureau Monday called on MEPs to “employ a natural or legal person … to “document their use of the funds.”

Although the bureau rejected any reforms to improve scrutiny of how the money is spent it did agree to one of the proposals — the transfer of GEA money in all cases to a separate bank account from the one where MEPs receive their salary.

“The Parliament's Bureau has just squandered its best chance to bring about any meaningful reform to the General Expenditure Allowance before the 2019 elections," said Nick Aiossa, an EU policy officer at the NGO Transparency International.