Auditing each fund against its own mandate: an objective-matched, municipal-scale assessment of EU cohesion instruments in France

European Union cohesion instruments pursue different legally mandated objectives, namely just transition, territorial cohesion, social inclusion and youth employment. Yet they are evaluated against shared outcomes at regional scales that aggregate heterogenous places. We propose a standardized audit that confronts each instrument with its own mandate: the stated objective is matched to municipal-scale indicators forming a need axis, against which targeting and coverage are measured across four instruments. We consolidate 72,491 co-financed operations in France (2014–2020 and 2021–2027) from Kohesio and managing-authority lists, geolocating 62.5% of operations (67.2% of amounts) to the municipality level. For the Just Transition Fund (JTF), the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) and the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI), we build regulation anchored need axes and compute targeting gradients, coverage of the highest-need quintile, and named blind-spot lists. Every audit is repeated under four index constructions: equal weights, principal components, cluster-based weights and rank normalization. We then re-run them at four coarser scales, from inter-municipal councils to regions. Each instrument misses a different kind of location. The Just Transition Fund is intensely need-targeted but reaches only 0.7% of highest-need municipalities; the European Regional Development Fund is regressive under every index construction; the European Social Fund Plus shows no need gradient and bypasses 4,550 poor rural municipalities (1.6 million inhabitants); no instrument covers more than 9% of its own highest-need municipalities. Spatial aggregation reverses these verdicts. The ERDF's need–funding correlation rises from −0.17 across municipalities to +0.80 across regions, and coverage saturates mechanically, hiding every blind spot one aggregation step above the municipality. Aggregated audits are also sensitive to index construction: at regional scale a fund's verdict can flip sign between constructions, whereas all four constructions agree at the municipal scale. Municipal-scale auditing, feasible today with existing transparency data, is the condition of a targeting verdict that is both correct and methodologically robust.