On-site verification of EU-funded aquaculture and fisheries investments in Galicia. One of several threads in this practice. See the systems-change thesis.
Under the EU’s fisheries and aquaculture fund (FEMPA), companies in Galicia receive subsidies to build and modernise aquaculture facilities and seafood-processing plants. Before the EU releases payment to the Xunta de Galicia, someone has to stand in the facility and certify that the subsidised investments exist, work, and match what was approved.
That someone is a technical inspector. I do these inspections for projects ranging from small aquaculture installations to processing plants worth tens of millions of euros.
What an inspection involves
- Physical verification. Machinery, equipment and construction checked item by item against the approved investment list.
- Scope discipline. Each visit verifies one payment period, only the items being paid, with prior inspectors’ findings respected.
- A certification report. The document that lets public money flow, with every claim traceable to its source.
Where the time went
The visit is the short part. The preparation is where the hours disappeared. A single project file can run to hundreds of documents. The master works report, invoices to reconcile against the approved items for the right payment period, monthly certifications, CE certificates for the equipment, layouts, and the notes of whoever inspected before.
From ten hours to two
I rebuilt the preparation as an AI-assisted workflow. Prep for a typical inspection now takes around two hours instead of ten.
- The workflow locates the key documents in the project file, reconciles every invoice against the approved list for the payment period in question, and flags what is missing.
- It produces the field checklist I carry into the facility and a gaps report of documents to request before the visit.
- After the visit, it assembles the certification report from my findings and labelled photos, with every header field cross-checked against its source document.
- The inspection itself stays fully human. What gets certified is what I verified with my own eyes on site.
The work runs on paid AI tools whose terms exclude client data from model training, with documents processed locally.
The workflow also learns. Supplier naming quirks, document patterns and edge cases from each inspection are captured and carried into the next one, so every project file gets faster to prepare than the one before. A one-person inspection practice ends up with the institutional memory of a team.
Why it fits this practice
Verification is where public funding earns its legitimacy. These inspections make sure EU money reaches real investments in the coastal economy, a world I know well from a decade of circular-economy work in fisheries. And the preparation workflow is a working example of the operating model described in what an AI-augmented consultant actually does. The desk work compresses; the field work, where the certification actually happens, gets the time it deserves.
If your organisation runs document-heavy verification, audit or compliance work and wants the desk side compressed the same way, our services page explains how we engage.