Among the many drastic changes wrought by the COVID-19 crisis has been the sudden shift to a virtual work environment. At the start of the pandemic, some audit offices had already made significant strides toward enabling remote work, while others conducted work primarily in-person, whether to build a collaborative work culture, ensure safe handling of sensitive documents, or due to limited information technology infrastructure or other reasons. The pandemic has presented..
Pacific Island Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs), many of which are very small in comparison with SAIs in other regions, face an array of challenges. These range from issues related to serving small populations, like a high risk of perceived conflicts of interest and difficulty recruiting and retaining qualified staff, to grave threats like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Given these challenges, it can be tempting for SAIs in the Pacific Association of SAIs (PASAI) region to...
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the United Kingdom’s National Audit Office (UK NAO) was able to effectively carry on its work by quickly pivoting to remote auditing and using technology to build relationships within the agency and around the world. Indeed, many auditors continued to conduct audits and publish audit reports without ever meeting their teams or clients in person. Aspects of UK NAO’s operations were not the only things to change. The Supreme Audit Institution’s (SAI) portfolio of work also...
Making informed planning decisions early in the audit process is key to completing audits in a timely manner. Many teams use historical information to determine how long an audit will take. But every audit and every audit organization is different, so it is impossible to...
Over the last five years, agencies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s public sector have undergone fundamental transformations—including restructuring, implementing governance mechanisms, and activating control requirements—aimed at improving their performance. The General Court of Audit (GCA), the country’s Supreme Audit Institution (SAI), has sought to contribute to these efforts by...
It is commonly held wisdom that every staff member in a Supreme Audit Institution (SAI) is responsible for audit quality, and that SAIs should ensure quality at every stage of the audit process through standard operating procedures. This is certainly true, especially for routine audits. However, in the case of audits that are complex...
In a 1995 case against Israel’s State Comptroller, the Israeli Supreme Court stated in its ruling that the “Comptroller has no discretion as to whether it should commit itself to the task of preparing an opinion as required of it; it is a mandatory obligation,” and directed the Comptroller to render an opinion on the required subjects.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, the Comptroller’s office, the nation’s Supreme Audit Institution...
Since it was established nearly 30 years ago, the State Audit Office of Vietnam (SAV) has become progressively more independent, in accordance with the principles of the 1977 Lima Declaration, the 2007 Mexico Declaration, and more recently, the...
SAIs are called upon to lead by example, as stated in ISSAI 20, which indicates transparency is a powerful force in combating corruption, improving governance and promoting accountability. The SAO of Hungary has employed several mechanisms over the years to enhance transparency and promote...
To better administer public resources and fight corruption, the Office of the Comptroller General of Ecuador—the country's Supreme Audit Institution (SAI)—is working to develop an anonymous hotline through which employees and members of the public can securely...