The focus of this MA thesis will be the analysis of the Croatian public administration for the absorption of EU funds. This analysis will be conducted on the example of the European Social Fund and on the Operational Programme "Efficient Human Resources". Absorption capacity is proving to be a very important phenomenon that affects the efficiency of Member States to make the best use of the resources they receive through their full membership in the European Union. The main hypothesis of this MA thesis is that Croatia has poor absorption capacities and is at the back in fund withdrawal from EU funds in the whole European Union. The whole EU fund system being inadequately informatized, the project application itself requires lots of effort, extensive documentation, vague guidelines, a large number of mediation bodies, poor coordination and poorly developed customer communication are just some of the problems encountered by EU fund users but also by the employees themselves. The aim of this paper is to illustrate shortcomings of this problem in Croatia. Better use of EU funds can greatly affect the prosperity of a member state of the Union and thus increase its GDP. This paper is composed of several parts. The first part is a conceptual framework and the status of Croatia in the European Union in relation to other new member states. For this purpose, I used the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria as examples, and their experiences with the absorption capacity. In the main part I wrote about the European Social Fund and the evaluation results of the Operational Programme Efficient Human Resources. Using this example, I showed all the positive and negative aspects of this program. In the final part I listed recommendations for improvement of efficiency of the use of the European Social Fund.