(STRASBOURG) - The European Parliament announced Tuesday it is launching a review of the way its deputies pay their assistants, after revelations of abuses of the system.

The bureau of the parliament -- its president plus the leaders of its political groups -- asked the elected chamber's secretary general on Monday to take up the matter with the 27 member states and the European Commission.

The aim is to come up with "a new set of rules for members' assistants, through an amended contract staff regime, whilst preserving the freedom of members to recruit their assistants and independently determine their salary levels," the EU parliament said in a statement Tuesday.

The decision comes after an internal parliamentary audit listed a litany of apparent abuses of the system.

The report has been sent to the European fraud office OLAF but has not been made public. It is kept in a secure room in the Strasbourg parliament building with only a few MEPs allowed to see it.

However some of those have given details to the press or via websites, speaking of members suspected of cheating over taxes and social security.

There are examples where the 15,500 euros (24,000 dollars) available for Euro MPs to pay their assistants were directed to accounts from the members themselves.

In one example, money had been sent to a day-care centre, and in another example, to a service provider dealing with wood," according to Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde.

In one case, an assistant received a Christmas bonus 19.5 times the size of his monthly salary, added Bonde, who has seen the report which dates back to 2004-2005.

Dutch Green MEP Paul van Buitenen published a summary of the audit report on his website, where he highlighted cases including payments to a company with no apparent business activities and payments to an MEP with no assistants at all.

"There are without doubt 10 percent of black sheep among the 785 eurodeputies," the Green party's vice-president of parliament Gerard Onesta told AFP.

Some 1,500 parliamentary assistants are accredited in Brussels, but most MEPs also employ more assistants in their home countries.

One useful change to the system mooted is to choose just one agency in each of the 27 member states to handle the remuneration of parliamentary assistants.

"The scandal is helping us to change things," said Onesta.

"But we are still hampered by the poor attitudes of some people internally," and externally by the reluctance of some nations to let the Brussels beast grow any larger, he added.

Meanwhile a separate working group led by French Socialist Martine Roure will look into the functioning of all parliamentary rules and will come up with proposals to modify them where deemed necessary.

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