Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) have been urged to collaborate with other stakeholders including CSOs and the media and the general public so as to make their audit reports be more meaningful. The call was made recently at a meeting hosted by the National Audit Office of Tanzania (NAOT) and the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) in Arusha Tanzania.
The meeting organised for the Working Group on the Value and Benefits of SAIs, met to deliberate on how SAIs in the member countries could be more effective in exercising their powers and how this effectiveness by SAIs can contribute to improved governance and accountability and more broadly improved service delivery to citizens.
SAIs, for example, can provide room for other stakeholders to participate in the audit process by letting them identifying possible areas for auditing. Although there is still hesitation amongst auditors in terms of creating room for other stakeholders to engage with them, it was interesting to hear from the CAG of Tanzania his positive views on engagement with CSOs based on the existing collaboration between his office and Policy Forum.
The members of the working group, however, observed that many SAIs, due to financially being depend on the government, had limited independence and in a way this influenced their way of auditing or producing reports. Experience shared pointed that this financial dependency however does not seem to compromise the quality of their audit reports.
Most of the participants emphasized the need for SAIs to publish their reports in a form that other actors including the media and citizens can find these reports useful and help in ensuring that the findings are discussed widely. These reports should be given to citizens with the understanding that these citizens can do what these SAIs cannot do.
On Sustainable Development Goals and how SAIs can maximize the value of their work, everyone agreed that SDGs require the attention of SAIs in order to monitor progress. The relevance of the SAIs will be enhanced if they take into account SDGs programmes. The discussion, however, centred on what to audit and what to leave out. There are so many social programmes under the SDGs and as such a clear criteria need to be developed to determine the issues that require auditing. It was pointed out that some regions have already developed papers on this subject and therefore a need for crosschecking to avoid duplication of work. The INTOSAI Development Initiative (IDI) is also starting a programme on SAIs and SDGs.
Also discussed was assessing and monitoring the performance of SAIs through the development of a single, global Performance Measurement Framework which provides the SAIs with voluntary assessment tools of their performance against the International Standards for Supreme Audit Institutions and other established international good practices for auditing. Participants agreed that SAI PMF is an important input for the working programme. The framework should however be able to consider differences at country level. Members were encouraged to take note of the SAI PMF high level strategy.
Participants discussed the need to have a framework regarding quality control including the existence of a specia unit for this. There was a general agreement that if SAIs fail on quality, then there are consequences including the reputation of their work.