The European Parliament approved the discharge for almost all EU organizations (thirty-nine reports in total were put to the vote) except the Council of Ministers, the European Medicine Agency and the European Police College (CEPOL) which have been postponed.

The European Parliament is the EU budget discharge authority. Once annual accounts are audited and finalised, Parliament decides - on a recommendation by the Council of Ministers - whether or not to grant discharge to the Commission and the other EU bodies for their spending in that year. This is the 'budget discharge procedure' which is voted first of all by the Parliament's Budgetary Control Committee.

With regard to the Council, the reason to postpone the vote until the autumn was that according to MEPs this institution was not co-operating sufficiently in providing information to Parliament. Parliament also postponed the discharge to the Director of the European Police College (CEPOL) due to its persistent lack of compliance with the Financial Regulation. As well as CEPOL, European Medicines Agency (EMEA) is an EU London-based agency and its discharge has been also postponed. MEPs believed there was no proper guarantee of the independence of experts hired to carry out scientific evaluations of human medicines and that some experts had conflicting interests in the case of the evaluation of the anorectic Benfluorex. The report also criticises the EMEA's management of procurement procedures and its lack of criteria for recruiting staff.

However the European Parliament gave its green light to the European Commission and to its Parliament's own budget. Among other savings measures, Parliament voted to have interpretation services for working group meetings provided automatically in only six languages (French, German, English, Polish, Spanish and Italian), with further languages to be made available only at the request of MEPs. In addition, other demands such as including rules to limit long-distance journeys with Parliament's official cars and special rules to prevent MEPs from employing members of each other's families as assistants were approved. Parliament also calls for a long-term review of the budget with a view to reducing costs.

Parliament granted discharge to the European Commission.Nevertheless, MEPs stressed their wish to see better management and control systems put in place for money spent by national authorities in the Member States under the system of 'shared management' which makes up for 80% of EU expenditure. They had also underlined the need for national politicians to take political responsibility for the way EU money is spent in their countries, by signing "national management declarations".