Are female MPs’ expenses sufficiently controlled?

In 2017, the law on the moralization of political life imposed a control on the expenditure of parliamentary mandates. This monitoring of expenditure is managed by an ethics officer who draws lots each year for 150 parliamentarians.s and scrutinizes their expenses over a year. In 5 years, each deputy will be drawn at least once during his term of office. Other MEPs also make public the breakdown of their mandate expenses for greater transparency.

This transparency could help limit abuses like those of LREM MP Coralie Dubost recently pinned down. For Béatrice Guillemont, general manager of Anticor, it would even be necessary to go even further: “Either by strengthening the means of the National Assembly and the ethics officer, or by making this data transparent so that others carry out the control unexpectedly, citizens for example”. Of the abuses which remain marginal, in 2020 according to the ethics officer, only 2.3% of the amounts were the subject of a request for reimbursement.