Liaison Officers are permanent representatives of European SAIs who support the activities of the Contact Committee (CC), which gathers the Heads of the Supreme Audit Institutions of the EU and the ECA. Liaison Officers prepare annual meetings of the CC and debate on the issues of vital importance to the CC.
At the meeting in Sofia, Liaison Officers discussed the preparations for the next CC meeting to be held in Luxembourg in October. They also debated on the proposals for the CC’s activities for 2012 and the following years.
The representatives of the SAIs of the Netherlands and the Czech Republic shared their experience in audits carried out jointly with the ECA. They presented the rules of cooperation between auditors of national SAIs and those of the ECA, as well as the effects of their joint initiatives. Such audits are related to national expenditures on the Common Agricultural Policy. They are conducted by audit teams composed of auditors of national SAIs and the ECA. They are not concluded with joint reports, but with sets of audit findings to be used by each body in their respective reports. These audit experiences will be presented at the next CC meeting.
Liaison Officers also discussed the questionnaire developed by the European Commission related to findings presented in the ECA’s annual reports. Some of its questions refer to the idea of introducing a single audit as an effective tool for EU funds management.
At the meeting in Sofia, working groups and cooperation networks that operate within the CC presented progress reports on their activities. Among the participants in the meeting, apart from representatives of 27 SAIs and ECA, there were delegates from six audit institutions from candidate countries and from SIGMA.
SIGMA SIGMA, Support for Improvement in Governance and Management, is a joint initiative of the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the field of public administration reforms, addressed to the states of Central and Eastern Europe and aimed to support EU candidate countries and EU potential candidate countries.
