The heads of the EU SAIs and the European Court of Auditors gather for annual meetings within the Contact Committee. Their latest meeting was dedicated to the fight against the economic crisis and challenges related to subsequent financing period in the EU.
Economic crisis
Jacek Mazur on the Contact Committee meeting
Public auditors want to join the fight against the economic downturn even more intensively. The Supreme Audit Institutions of Eurozone countries had shown previously they wanted to be included in the European Mechanism of Stability (EMS). Works are pending on the amendments of regulations that will enable that. The auditors general (AGs) also discussed the possibility of applying and promoting the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS). A special Contact Committee seminar on that subject will take place in spring 2013.
During the meeting in Portugal, the heads of the Supreme Audit Institutions presented selected reports which directly or indirectly respond to the growing financial crisis. For instance, the Swedish talked about an audit of receiving different kinds of budget income, and the Dutch gave an account of an audit of monitoring risks which may have impact on the state budget expenses in the future.
Within the past years, several cases of manipulating public debt statistics have been revealed in the EU member states. The Supreme Audit Office of Poland and its Danish counterpart co-chaired the task force which reviewed the possibility of cooperation of public auditors with Eurostat and national statistical offices. The AGs gathered in Portugal agreed that despite the differences in terms of rights, obligations and competencies they and the said institutions had a common goal being sound public management. SAIs are the only institutions that have access to the source data in particular countries (it concerns e.g. the data presented in Poland by the communes, the Social Security Office and other public institutions). They may therefore play an important role in monitoring reliability of statistics kept by the central government- and local government institutions.
The next Contact Committee meeting will take place in Vilnius, in October 2013.
