As the European Commission threatened to launch a discipline procedure against Bulgaria for exceeding the deficit ceiling of 3% of GDP, the country's commissioner in Brussels has warned keeping the figure under EU rules won't be easy.

“The aim of the government is to bring the budget deficit below 3% by the end of the year, but that will not be easy,” Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva said during her stay in Bulgaria.

She however voiced confidence that the cabinet will manage to deal with that task “given the conditions that Bulgaria has now and the attention which is paid to this issue”.

Representatives of the European Commission are expected to pay a visit to Bulgaria to hammer out together with the local experts measures that will help reduce the fiscal gap.

“There are two issues that will be addressed during this visit. Firstly experts will want to see whether the high deficit is a one-off act or systematic. Secondly, they will study the efficiency of the measures for a cut in expenses and a boost in revenues,” Georgieva explained.

She tried to assuage fears over Bulgaria's deficit woes, saying that Brussels may take up punitive measures only if the gap, which stood last year at 3.9%, continues to swell.

“This will hardly happen though,” she added, citing as examples Spain and Ireland, whose deficits exceed 10%.

The European Union's official statistics agency Thursday said the Bulgarian budget deficit in 2009 was wider than the government had estimated, even though Sofia recently revised upwards its last year's fiscal gap due to a hidden deficit.

In the first of its twice-yearly reviews of government finances in the 27-member bloc, Eurostat said the Bulgarian government's budget deficit was 3.9% of gross domestic product last year, which is up by 0.2% over the government's revised figure.

Bulgaria's center-right government announced earlier in April a larger than expected 2009 deficit caused by unaccounted procurement deals, signed by the previous Socialist-led cabinet. The previously undiscovered expenses increased the 2009 gap to 3.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) from an initial 1.9% under the EU rules, the cabinet said.

Experts however commented that though much better than other member states, Bulgaria's larger than expected 2009 deficit will worsen its chances for application to join the bloc's exchange-rate mechanism ERM II.

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