SUPREME AUDIT INSTITUTIONS

The Supreme Audit Institutions play a major role in auditing the counts and the activities of public administration and in promoting a healthy financial administration of public funds and a general responsibility inside the governments. Taking into consideration the growing expectations of the citizens, of the internationals donors of funds and the expectations of the nationals governments, these governments depend on the Supreme Audit Institutions to help them to guarantee the responsibility concerning the accountancy of the public administration. While in the private sector we have a competitive environment regarding the providers of audit services in spite of the concentration of the services in the hands of The Big Four, the external audit in the public sector has one essential characteristic and that is the monopoly of the Supreme Audit Institutions. That’s way these institutions are responsible for the auditing of the counts and activities of the public administration. The Supreme Audit Institutions face different characteristics because of countries’ distinct constitutional, legal, social, economic and political system. We realized a comparative study on the Supreme Audit Institutions of several countries members of the European Union. For this study we selected countries from Central and Eastern Europe and Romania is one of them. The point from which we started the selection of these countries is that Romania in this geographic region and the fact that all the countries that we selected are countries in course of development. Taking into consideration the aspects mentioned above we selected the following countries: • Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Republic of Slovenia, The Slovak Republic, Poland and The Czech Republic. For each of these seven Supreme Audit Institutions we focused our attention towards the following aspects: • 1. The moment of the establishment of the institution; • 2. The moment when the institution became a member of INTOSAI • 3. The organization of the Supreme Audit Institution; • 4. The mission of the Supreme Audit Institution; • 5. The types of audit exercised by each Supreme Audit Institution. • The article contains a short presentation of each county, that we selected for the study, regarding all the aspects mentioned above. • In order to have effective public auditing, public auditors must report their results • To both the public and to their democratically elected representatives (Public Audit Forum, 1999: 2). Audit reports constitute the most important SAI fieldwork document and the principal means of communication with their main audience (Waerness, 1999: 150). But is it the only tool available for reporting results? How is this information made available? Do SAIs provide interested parties with any extra information on top of the reports? Do they have a communication strategy.