Auditor Says DG COMP Should ‘Scale Up’ Its Enforcement—How?

The European Court of Auditors’ (‘ECA’) report The Commission’s EU merger control and antitrust proceedings: A need to scale up market oversight published in late 2020 is its first audit of DG Competition’s (‘DG COMP’) enforcement activities. It found that the ‘commission made good use of its enforcement powers’ within its ‘limited budget’, but as the report’s subtitle suggests, ‘it needed to scale up its market oversight’. It recommends more proactive enforcement, monitoring, prioritising, and ex post evaluations, better coordination with national competition authorities, and increased resources devoted to ‘own initiated’ detection. I will show that although the its key recommendation that ‘own activities are unsupported and may well decrease the effectiveness of DG COMP’. Here I focus on the antitrust sections of the report.