Supreme Audit Office of the Slovak Republic

Bratislava, December 9, 2022 – The current complex situation caused by the concurrence of several crises in the last three years requires changes within the Supreme Audit Office (SAO) of the Slovak Republic. One of the fundamental changes in the office's activities concerns the planning of audits. "Starting next year, we are switching to a floating planning system. From the beginning of the year, audits will no longer be scheduled for one hundred percent of personnel capacities. Over the course of the year, we will supplement the plan of audits based on significance, the results of risk analyzes or suggestions from the office's memorandum partners or the public," explained president  Ľubomír Andrassy about the planned adjustments to the functioning of the national authority for external audit. Flexible planning will enable to more quickly adjust the mirror to the costly measures that the government currently has to take in order to mitigate the effects of crises. "If measures are taken quickly and non-standardly, there is also a high risk of errors," warned the president of the national auditors.

The pandemic, the consequences of the war in Ukraine or the energy crisis require national governments and parliaments to take operational decisions. "The obligation resulting from our society-wide mission is, in this critical time, to model projects of audit actions that will provide the public with objective evaluations of processes within the organizations of the state or local self-government, and which will support the minimization of risks associated with the misuse of public funds, non-transparent handling of property or corrupt practices representatives of public authority," explains the head of the office. According to Andrassy, ??it is important to set a new thematic education in this agenda with the participation of national and international experts, to define clear methodological procedures and to create professional positions within the organizational structure of the national audit institution. Slovak auditors will, among other things, initiate the cooperation of European audit authorities with the aim of setting up joint parallel audits so that they can be used to verify, for example, the effectiveness of set compensation measures, or mutual comparison and definition of examples of good or bad practice.

The full text of the press release about this issue in Slovak language is available here. Use the Google icon in the top bar for automatic translation.