The European Commission and EU countries all did a terrible job of monitoring cars for illegal emissions and failed to catch overt cheating by Volkswagen, according to the main draft findings of a European Parliament inquiry committee published Monday.

The so-called Dieselgate Committee was set up earlier this year to figure out why U.S. rather than European authorities caught Volkswagen rigging its cars to cheat on emissions tests.

“Dieselgate would not have happened if our national governments and the European Commission would have acted on their legal and administrative responsibilities,” said Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, a Dutch Liberal MEP and one of the authors of the report. “Our investigation points out that unnecessary delays in decision-making, negligence and maladministration have contributed to making this fraud possible.”

The 10 months of testimony before the committee showed that EU regulations are a muddle and powerful local car industries are often in cahoots with national regulators and car testing centers that are supposed to certify that new car models meet EU rules. Some commissioners, as well as some national authorities, were clueless about the ability of car manufacturers to install illegal defeat devices.

The testimony highlighted confusion about the rules: Defeat devices — software fixes that allow a car to know it is being tested and so turn on its pollution controls for only a limited time — are illegal. Other methods are in a gray area. Automakers are allowed to shut off pollution controls to protect engines, but it turned out some carmakers set the temperatures to activate such devices at ludicrously high levels, meaning that pollution controls were almost never on.

Officials were also long aware that cars emit much higher levels of nitrogen oxide — the main ingredient of smog — on the road compared to in the lab. That was largely blamed on outdated testing methods. But those concerns made it difficult for officials within the Commission’s various directorates to get traction on related worries about illegal defeat devices.

Brussels also could have pushed to ensure the EU made a faster transition from testing cars in the laboratory to on the road.

“The delays were also due to choices of political priorities, such as the focus of the Commission and the member states on avoiding burdens on industry in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis,” the report said.

The Commission has no legal basis to search for defeat devices itself, but it is legally obliged to make sure national governments enforce the existing ban on them.

That didn’t happen.

“The Commission neither undertook any further technical or legal research or investigation on its own nor requested any information or further action from the member states to verify if there might be a case of law infringement,” the draft report said.

A Commission spokeswoman said Brussels will wait on the final report before commenting on it.

EU countries were also blamed for failing to monitor and enforce the ban. They did not impose any penalties on carmakers after last year’s Volkswagen scandal and were reluctant to share the results of their investigations with Brussels and the committee. Due to this and other reasons, “member states have contravened their obligations to implement the EU law on car emissions under the current system,” according to the draft.

Those failures allowed carmakers to skirt the rules for longer, affecting air quality in European cities. And it meant that cars were significantly dirtier than advertised.

“I’m sure we could not have prevented the use of defeat devices, but we could have prevented their use for such a long time,” said Kathleen Van Brempt, the committee’s chairwoman and Belgian MEP from the Socialists and Democrats group. “If the Commission and member states would have applied the law strictly and would have been more active to put air quality first and not industry, then we would have discovered it much, much earlier.”

The Parliament criticism of Brussels comes less than two weeks after the Commission took legal action against seven EU countries, including Germany and the U.K., for failing to crack down on carmakers following Volkswagen’s emissions cheating scandal.

The report is still a draft, and there’s likely to be a fight in Parliament over its final shape and its recommendations. The report calls for giving responsibility for car emissions and air quality to a single commissioner, which would end the current bureaucratic tangle.

The report’s recommendations aren’t binding, but officials hope it will influence reform of the EU’s type approval process, where the Commission has proposed boosting its powers to oversee the work of national governments.

That’s likely to provoke a pushback from countries like Germany that have powerful car industries.

“This is going to be the big battle between Parliament and Council,” Green Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout said. “Until now, you don’t get the feeling that the Council is learning from dieselgate,” he added, referring to a push among some national governments to water down the Commission’s type-approval proposals.

MEPs vote on final inquiry committee recommendations in March or April.

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