Kick off meeting ARACHNE PROJECT

Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning Assumptions and responsibilities Next steps Q&A

Project overview Objectives: « Project ARACHNE aims at establishing a comprehensive and complete database of projects impletemented under the Structural Funds in Europe and to enrich the data with publicly available information in order to identify, based on a set of risk indicators, the most risky projects. » Objectives: To develop, test and implement a risk scoring tool which facilitates the continuous monitoring of internal and external data regarding beneficiaries. This tool shall: promote the use of a risk based approach in the planning of the verification of projects, the audit of projects and selection of projects; complement the risk assessment as regards fraud and irregularities in a consistent way throughout the EU; identify irregular circumstances on a continuous basis on the basis of pre- defined risk criteria in internal and external data regarding beneficiaries; provide guidance to Member States on risk indicators and internal controls; build up an overall better defence against fraud and errors.

GET Application Server Project overview Member States DIGIT GET Application Server Operational Data Operational Data GET database SFC2007 Vadis European Commission Member States Operational Data GET database Orbis World Compliance Web mining

Project overview – Risk testing categories Test category Description Ratio analysis Study undertaken to assess the financial strengths and weaknesses (such as distribution of costs over cost categories) of the project and its operating trend compared to the averages. Sanity checks Basic checks on logicality and reasonability of project data. Cross checks Cross-project and cross-operating programme checks. Performance checks Assessment of wheter or not predefined goals were met. Financial alerts Overall financial performance of beneficiaries and (sub)contractors, based on financial reporting data Relationship alerts Relationships between beneficiaries or (sub)contractors, and the people involved in them. Reputation alerts Involvement in locations or activities (such as prior bankruptcies) that could possible result in reputational damages. Sanction alerts Identification of beneficiaries, (sub)contractors or people involved in them, that are blacklisted or appear on any type of sanction list. Change alerts Identify any type of changes to the company structure. Negative info alerts Identification of any other negative information made available through text and web mining.

Project overview – main functionalities Data upload from Member States through SFC2007 web services Feed-back loop management system Data enrichment at Vadis (Orbis, WorldCompliance, web mining) Risk score calculation based on internal and external data Output visualisation in a dashboard High risk beneficiaries / projects Drill-down functionalities Visualisation of links between entities/individuals Scenario analysis Export options Report management system Case management User management

Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning Assumptions and responsibilities Next steps Q&A

Scope and project team Scope: Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (DG EMLP) and Directorate-General for Regional Policy (DG REGIO) European Social Fund, European Regional Development Fund, Cohesion Fund. (it should be noted that for the ERDF and CF, a maximum of 60 OP’s or/and 60 Managing Autorities will be selected for the Risk Scoring Tool)

Scope and project team Steering Committee Quality Assurance Team Service Delivery Manager System owner Technical Project Manager Functional Project Manager Business manager Quality Assurance Team User representatives Quality Assurance & Issue Manager DIGIT Deployment and configuration team Analysis and design team Development team Test team Technical documentation & trainings team

Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning Assumptions and responsibilities Next steps Q&A

Project Planning 1/1/’12 1/7/’12 1/1/’13

Project Planning -deliverables Milestone * Deliverable 12 January 2012 DLV 0-1 : Signed minutes of the kick-off meeting with attached the Project Quality Plan and Test Strategy Plan 19 March 2012 DLV 1-1 : Functional design report DLV 1-2 : Test scenario’s 04 April 2012 DLV 3.1-1 : Operational SFC2007 interfaces 21 May 2012 DLV 2-1 : Performance and accessibility testing report 03 July 2012 DLV 4.1-1 : Centralized data of the Member States 30 July 2012 DLV 3.2-1: Acceptance testing report basic prototype dashboard DLV 3.2-2: Basic working prototype of the dashboard (release 1) 14 August 2012 DLV 4.2-1 : Risk scoring output per Member State 25 September 2012 DLV 4.3-1 : Activity report on Member State setup 18 October 2012 DLV 3.3-1 : Acceptance testing report full working prototype dashboard DLV 3.3-2 : Full working prototype of the dashboard (release 2) 29 November 2012 DLV 5-1 : User manuals in English and French DLV 5-2 : Training materials 7 March 2013 DLV 6-1 : Minutes of project closing meeting * The dates above are listed in our proposition under the presumption that a kick off meeting would take place on January 11th, 2012. As the kick off meeting did not take place on that date, the dates will change accordingly.

Project Planning – test & acceptance approach Extreme Programming (XP) methodology Development environment and production environment Functional tests Technical tests Performance tests Final metrics will be determined during the functional design meeting. A T1/T2/T3 review cycle will be applied for this project: T1 refers to the time needed by the European Commission (e.g. 20 working days) to report findings/incidents (if any) on the deliverable; T2 refers to the time needed by the Vadis project team (e.g. 10 working days) to provide its position on the findings reported by the European Commission, find an agreement and implement the resolutions. The adapted deliverable is then delivered for a final round of acceptance testing (Iteration 2). T3 refers to the time needed by the European Commission (e.g. 10 working days) to deploy & verify the correct implementation of the corrections.  Once the deliverable is found to be conforming to the acceptance criteria, it will be approved by the European Commission for acceptance.

Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning Assumptions and responsibilities Next steps Q&A

Assumptions and responsibilities The Member States will be responsible for the development of system queries that generate xml files which meet the requirements, the providing of data and the validation of the output. The Member States will be responsible for the quality and accuracy of their data. The communication with the Member States during the on-boarding, discussions on data format/quality, end user validation and roll out will to a large extend be organized remotely. The availability of following people to the project team is ensured by the European Commission: Central auditors; Representatives of Operational Programs / Member States; IT department; The user requirements will be considered as final after the functional design phase. Acceptance testing will be performed on the data of 1 Member State. DIGIT will provide the required IT infrastructure.

Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning Assumptions and responsibilities Next steps Q&A

Next steps Day-to-day contact person representing DG Employment and DG Regio Contact person(s) representing the Member States Announcement letters Functional design workshops Attendants Contact details Dates List of managing authorities Appointment of a ‘sponsoring’ managing authority List of internal database of European Commission that can be included in the risk scoring (e.g. Central Exclusion Database) DIGIT Technical specifications SFC2007 Next meeting of the Steering Committee

Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning Assumptions and responsibilities Next steps Q&A