Kathmandu, Dec 12, 2019 : An international workshop ‘Advancing Audit Accountability: How can we strengthen responsiveness and actions’ kicked off in Kathmandu on Wednesday.
The two-day learning exchange workshop is taking place amidst the participation from seven different countries of the globe. This meeting has brought together participants from supreme audit institutions and civil society representatives, who have engaged extensively with audit agendas in their countries and international public finance specialties who are knowledgeable on audits.
The Office of the Auditor General of Nepal, the International Budget Partnership and Freedom Forum hosted the event as part of the audit accountability initiative.
“Under the initiative, a community of audit experts in various countries, including Nepal, Ghana, Tanzania, Argentina, Mexico and Sierra Leone is testing a hypothesis that enhanced strategic engagement among key oversight actors and from within and outside government can promote action on select audit findings that are currently being ignored by government entities”, informed Claire Schouten, senior strategic manager of the International Budget Partnership (IBP) which convened the learning initiative.
The community is participating in the initiative to help catalyze relationships among various oversight actors in target countries, clearly communicate the problems identified by audits and spur actions needed to address these problems.
“As a partner of the initiative, we are testing the learning hypothesis on users’ committee performance being based on the OAG audit findings through the intervention of communication, engagement and research activities”, said Taranath Dahal, Chief Executive Officer of Freedom Forum.
Lessons from this initiative can generate evidence on how audits truly become tools for enhancing government accountability, Schouten added.
“The meeting will build on lessons and recommendations that emerged from meetings on audit accountability in 2016, 2017 and 2018”, she further briefed.
The key expected outcome from the workshop is to advance strategies to strengthen collective actions and responsiveness of government to audits of public concern.
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