#219 Erasmus+ Therapy Session: New Audit Regime

Erasmus+ Audits – Lump Sums, Fear & Audit Culture
An Erasmus+ Therapy panel on compliance, trust and what must change

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In this episode I’m joined again by Henriette Hansen, Daiana Huber and Alessandro Melillo for another Erasmus+ Therapy session — this time focused entirely on audits. We talk about a feeling many practitioners will recognise: that the audit discourse has shifted from something closer to good faith and improvement towards something more punitive, suspicious and bureaucratic. Henriette reflects on how the move to lump sums originally sounded like a welcome shift towards outputs and project quality, only to find that her first lump-sum audit still felt dominated by error-hunting and a low tolerance for honest explanations about difficulties and adaptations in implementation.

From there we go deeper into the paradox that many coordinators now live with: yes, projects may be called lump sum, but if you want to survive an audit you still behave as if you are in a real-cost universe. Daiana and Alessandro describe the mountain of documentation that can still be requested in practice, the confusion this creates for newcomers, and the wider damage of fear-driven compliance on innovation, trust and motivation. We end by asking what should change: clearer expectations, more constructive audit cultures, more room for appreciation of what projects actually achieved, and stronger policy dialogue between agencies, auditors and the people running Erasmus+ projects on the ground.

Time codes:

02:21 Guest introduction and fly in

05:14 The old logic vs. the new logic

11:49 Presumption of guilt and fear-driven compliance

26:18 Who is this audit discourse really protecting?

37:03 What needs to change

42:25 The toughest challenge