Technical Advancement

The Governing Board created the Technical Committee which includes representatives from the AFROSAI-E region as well as the institutional partners (Swedish National Audit Office and the Netherlands Court of Auditors) to initiate the development and the approval of technical products on their behalf as well as the monitoring of compliance with international standards.

Annually, the Technical Committee meets to review all technical material which was either updated or developed from scratch. All documentation is also provided to member SAI’s in the region to give their inputs and to ensure that the material is not only technical and factually correct but also practical in the SAI environment. After approval by the Technical Committee the material is launched at the Technical Update where the final version is released to all member SAI’s. Where the material is for example an audit manual, a particular SAI can decide whether to adopt the manual and customize to comply with their laws and regulations or just implement it as it is.

The Secretariat does not only heavily rely on the pool of trainers which were established to train staff in the region but also has already established technical experts in the areas of quality assurance and regularity audit. A pool of experts for other audit disciplines will also be established. The responsibilities of these experts are not only to assist the Secretariat with the development and improvement of audit disciplines but also to inform regional SAI’s of latest developments in the different audit disciplines.

To ensure the effectiveness of the training which is provided by the Secretariat intends to focus more on on-the-job training to make training not only more specific but also more practical.

Audit disciplines which have already been established, include:

·       Quality Assurance

·       Regularity Audit

·       Performance Audit

·       Information systems audit

·       Environmental audit

·       Gender awareness