The meeting of two sub-groups of the INTOSAI Working Group on the Fight Against Corruption and Money Laundering (WGFACML) has just finished at the headquarters of NIK (INTOSAI is an organisation associating Supreme Audit Institutions from all around the globe). In Warsaw, auditors from 13 Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) worked together on the guidelines on how to prevent financial pathologies in public life and boost social confidence in public administration - including SAIs.
Role of Supreme Audit Institutions in fight against corruption and money laundering
INTOSAI against corruption
The meeting agenda included discussion on the guidelines that the WGFACML is preparing, to be recommended by INTOSAI to all member organisations, dedicated to such topics as, among others, the role of internal control in preventing corruption, principle of rotation in office, principle of the second pair of eyes, or cooperation with other institutions involved in the fight against corruption. The international guidelines for auditors are aimed to provide a practical tool to fight with financial pathologies. In the long-term perspective, adopting common audit standards is to further good governance in the administration of individual countries.
Already in 2012, European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström raised alarm over the corruption level in the European Union. Corruption costs for the EU economy are about EUR 120 billion. This is not only a problem of the countries that have recently joined the EU but also of the Founding Member States. It is worth mentioning that the European Commission appreciated Poland for its fight against that pathology, and the Supreme Audit Office in particular for its effective actions in this area.
NIK's efforts were also positively evaluated by Transparency International. Independence and transparency on part of the Polish SAI was noted and appreciated. In the report called: Anticorruption mechanisms in Poland NIK scored 88 in 100 points. That was the best result among all Polish public institutions.
”We focus a lot on the corruption prevention as we believe it is much better to prevent it than fight against it later” - in those words NIK President Krzysztof Kwiatkowski summed up the meeting of the INTOSAI Working Group.
