Public verifiability of EU grants to non-profit beneficiaries: an entity-level, cross-registry method - The Belgium Pilot, 2014–2024

This paper documents the method, sources, validation record and limitations of an entity-level, cross-registry dataset of European Union grants to non-profit beneficiaries registered in Belgium. Grant records published by the European Commission's Financial Transparency System (FTS) for Belgian NGO and non-profit beneficiaries over 2014 to 2024, comprising 22,179 individual grant award rows published under 2,507 beneficiary name strings and totalling €7,887,561,082.54 in committed amounts, were reconciled at legal-entity level against three official Belgian public registries: the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE) for legal identity, the National Social Security Office (ONSS) for employer registration, and the National Bank of Belgium (NBB) Central Balance Sheet Office for annual-account filings.

A four-layer reconciliation produced 758 verified legal entities, each with at least €500,000 in cumulative committed grants, jointly accounting for €7,288,841,649, equal to 92.41% of the funding universe.

The dataset measures public verifiability, defined as what a citizen can establish about a publicly funded organisation from official public records. It is a citizen-access index, not a compliance index, and it makes no finding on legality, regularity or fraud.

The method was tested before publication through formal notification of five EU institutions and a structured right-of-reply process with the profiled organisations. No data point has been contradicted, and the European Court of Auditors confirmed in writing on 24 April 2026 that the analysis aligns with observations in its Special Report 11/2025.

The paper states the scope limit precisely: the FTS covers EU budget implementation under direct and indirect management only, so the dataset is a documented floor of EU funding to these entities, not a census.