Speech of the President of the Supreme Audit Office of Slovakia, Mr Ján Jasovský
Seminar - 20th Anniversary of the SAO, Senate of the Parliament of the CR, 25.7.2013
Mr President,
esteemed guests,
ladies and gentlemen,
first of all I would like to congratulate the Supreme Audit Office of the Czech Republic on the 20th anniversary of its existence, just as President Miloslav Kala did in Bratislava about three months ago when we also marked the 20th year of the existence of the Supreme Audit Office of the Slovak Republic.
We have been and are to this day linked by the shared history of our nations and by the backgrounds to the founding of our independent audit institutions. The road we have travelled from 1993 to the present day has been neither easy nor straight. Our mutual relations, however, have always been very close and beneficial. They began to develop shortly after the founding of the supreme audit institutions following the division of the former Czechoslovak Republic. While in the early days we looked for ways to fulfil our mission as defined in the national legislations effectively, today we deal with shared challenges arising from the unified Europe.
Mutual cooperation has always been inspiring for us and remains so today. I also think this is one of the directions in which supreme audit institutions should develop in the coming years. Cooperation with the Supreme Audit Office of the Czech Republic mainly developed in the area of exchange of knowledge and experiences in various specialised fields and during coordinated and parallel audits. Since 2005 alone there have been 54 joint bilateral meetings organized either in Slovakia or in the Czech Republic.
Since the year 2000 we have jointly conducted seven audits focusing on the environment, tax and asylum policy. In our joint work we have formed friendly mutual relationships which - and I value this particularly highly - enable us to consult directly our current problems.
All around the world initiatives are emerging that seek new paths for audit and control; audits must be more effective and beneficial for an organisation while entailing lower costs. That is also the case in the public sphere, where the public demands more effective public institutions financed from public money. We are constantly looking for ways to increase the value of our work. Not just in terms of the quantity of audited entities but, above all, by scrutinising and assessing their effectiveness, i.e. through performance audit.
We should be aware that we are ourselves part of the public sphere which can only draw on resources created by society. There must be a demand for every public service. For that reason we extended our audit powers to all public finances of regional governments, as recommended by international institutions, in other words to independent external and objective audit of regional governments in all their scope. This step still lies ahead for my Czech colleagues.
Improving quality, assessing performed control work and evaluating and measuring the performance of supreme audit institutions are some of the most important issues of the day. The ISSAI standards being revised with the intensive participation of Slovak experts from the SAO of the Slovak Republic since they were adopted in China in autumn create a better basis for the correct working and professional management of supreme audit institutions and for the fundamental principles of the audit of public finances.
The knowledge and information potential of supreme audit institutions is one of the important and tried-and-tested sources of experiences which, in the spirit of the INTOSAI motto "Mutual experience benefits all", is the reason for intensive international cooperation. That is something we could confirm fairly recently, on 13 and 14 June in Bratislava, during a discussion between members of the INTOSAI sub-committee on promoting best practice and quality assurance through voluntary peer reviews, which we chair.
The future of every audit institution will be impossible without development and, increasingly, a broader focus on performance audit. My wish for the Supreme Audit Office of the Czech Republic and personally for its president is that the Office will have lots of enthusiastic people, capable experts and loyal workers. I would like to thank my colleagues from the Czech SAO for their cooperation to date.
Thank you for your attention.