Performance audits, which aim to provide citizens with new information and trace final destinations of money spent, theoretically share a common purpose with public institutions—to better serve the citizens.
Yet, in practice, serving the citizens can be difficult. As Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs), achieving this shared purpose means overcoming challenges associated with the auditing field, technicalities that make communicating with and incorporating stakeholders crucial SAI activities. An auditor’s vocabulary, often referred to as audit speak, can be difficult for citizens to understand. It is important for SAIs to provide reports that are comprehensive, clear and concise. ALSAI has taken steps to communicating in a more meaningful way by "translating" reports using less complex, more understandable language. ALSAI has gone a step further by transforming written reports into visual stories to convey audit findings in an aesthetic, user-friendly way. Establishing a new communication standard with auditees can also prove beneficial. Creating synergy between the SAI and organization being audited results in a much more impactful report.
Developing partnerships with media provides a direct path to communicating audit work and audit results with citizens. It also demonstrates transparency, which enhances SAI credibility and strengthens stakeholder relations and trust. Performance audit topic flexibility has also resulted in extraordinary teamwork opportunities and closer contact with stakeholders. No longer positioned in cooperative “outskirts," stakeholders have become central to audit work. Some recent ALSAI examples include:
• Collaborative work with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). After signing a cooperation agreement to implement a "Transparency in the Health System" project, ALSAI performance auditors and USAID experts engaged in a joint audit specifically to address medical emergencies in Albania. Relations were further strengthened through several USAID-organized workshops.
• Cooperative work with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, an NGO, included ALSAI in a project where ALSAI conducted a performance audit on “Quality of Student Services in Public Universities.” ALSAI implemented direct communication mechanisms with stakeholders (students) as part of the performance audit, which provided value feedback leading to improved audit work and reports having greater impact.
Service to citizens must not solely be measured on producing audit products. Stakeholder accessibility throughout audit work (from beginning to end) and communicating this work are essential to enhancing a SAI’s ability to provide value and benefits to citizens. Conceived as an intellectual and working philosophy, performance auditing in ALSAI, now in its seventh year, has become a marathon fleet designed to reach modern day capabilities of European affiliates.
Performance auditing comes with no framework. It is merely a sketch that needs a little history and some literature to fully shape it. It is a practice that extends ebyond a SAI’s boundaries. It constitutes a national reform through its introduction of a new managerial approach – an approach that lends itself to efficiency, flexibility, change.
Albanian Supreme Audit Institution (PHAN THU HIỀN dịch)