How effective is the Accounting Chamber?

News (category) -

views

April 17, 2024

Proper planning of audits, identification and assessment of risks, monitoring of recommendations can significantly improve the work of the Accounting Chamber and increase public confidence in its activities. This was stated by Viktor Maziarchuk, Head of the Center for Fiscal Policy Research, during a roundtable discussion on the effectiveness of state financial control organized by the Center for Economic Strategy.

Duplication of functions

According to him, the experts analyzed the work of the Accounting Chamber in 2019-2023. One of the key problems is the overlap of powers of the Accounting Chamber and the State Audit Service of Ukraine (SASU) in terms of financial audit. “Our international colleagues are also talking about this. We need to amend a number of regulations and actually resolve this issue legally,” said Maziarchuk.

Poor quality of planning

In addition, the experts drew attention to the low quality of audit planning. Only two thirds of the proposals of the Accounting Chamber members are included in the annual plan, and many of these proposals do not have qualitative justifications. “The annual plan includes only two thirds of the proposals of the Accounting Chamber members, respectively 10% of the proposals are their changes to the plan, a small part are proposals from MPs or NGOs. In addition, there are unscheduled mandatory audits, which, according to the law on the Accounting Chamber, it is obliged to conduct,” the expert said.

The study also showed that the members of the Accounting Chamber plan the process of conducting audits formally and are too optimistic about the timeframe for their conduct. This leads to the fact that most of the audits are completed with a long delay, which averages 4 months. “They should not be optimistic. They should be realistic and understand that something can go wrong, on the one hand, and on the other hand, there is a problem of human and staff potential,” said Maziarchuk. – “This suggests that it is necessary, among other things, to strengthen executive discipline among the members, and in this case it would be a good recommendation to the Budget Committee to look at this aspect. He also emphasized that most proposals to the work plan are submitted without identifying the risk assessment.

Disparity in the areas of audits

In addition, the analysts found a disproportion in the areas of audits and emphasized that some of the Chamber’s recommendations remain unimplemented or are implemented formally. “The quality of most of the recommendations provided by the Accounting Chamber does not meet the SMART criteria. They can be poorly formulated, very broad, so auditors should pay special attention to this and work on it,” he said.