Learn about the Czech SAO

The Supreme Audit Office of the Czech Republic (SAO) is a young office established in 1993. Its status and independence from the executive and legislative powers is set in the Czech Republic´s Constitution. The SAO has a collegiate leadership; its managing board consists of the President, the Vice-President and 15 Members. The board adopts, inter alia, the annual audit plan or annual reports. The SAO is entitled to audit state funds and property, and also funds provided to the Czech Republic from abroad, for example from the EU.

Independent and respected office

Apart from audits, the office cooperates on the legislative process, publishes EU Report on the financial management of the EU funds in the Czech Republic, and gives opinion on the state closing account. Despite of our seemingly short existence, our word counts. We have the respect of public, but also the government and the parliament. We have the trust of nearly half the population of the Czech Republic, same as the Constitutional Court or Ombudsman´s office. The government discussed and used recommendations from 85 % of our audit conclusions. The results of our audits are well known to the public thanks to the media which regularly cite our work. Consequently, it is not a coincidence that our spokesperson was the fourth most cited among public institutions in 2015.

We put emphasis on continual improvement and self-reflection, therefore, we underwent a self-assessment according to the SAI Performance Measurement Framework in 2016. We had the best or the second best scores in all indicators.

Being “a young office”, we like to use modern technologies which streamline and facilitate our work, and help us target our audits with the utmost precision. We use Business Intelligence. Our auditors use our own Audit Information System to deal with their daily tasks, and they administer documents within the special file and document storage Athena. We have been building our own data warehouse where data from public administration IS are further processed and evaluated.

Cooperation and information sharing

We do not keep our knowledge in hiding. We believe that sharing of relevant, correct information, knowledge and experience is very important within the public funds audit, and it contributes to improvement of SAIs´s work. Therefore we launched the BIEP project (Benchmarking and Information Exchange Project) which will enable other SAIs to share reliable and comparable data and examples of best practice from various areas of public administration. To facilitate the information sharing among SAIs, we have set up two databases under the umbrella of GT3 EUROSAI, the database of audits and the database of products.

It is because of the importance we put on international cooperation that we are an active member within EUROSAI, INTOSAI, and other international organisations where we have our representatives, e.g. ESA (European Space Agency) and EDA (European Defence Agency). The cooperation is not only about databases and data exchange, but also about face-to-face meetings. Since our establishment, we managed to organise 60 international events on various topics (pdf 79 kB).

We believe that each public institution should be transparent. We set an example, and were the first public institution to make its data public in the National Register of Open Data. We also publish and regularly update our budget and our contracts over EUR 1 750 on our website.

Working life in the Supreme Audit Office

As we are all aware that not only tasks directly related to our work are part of the working life, we try to create working conditions which would enable our employees to balance their working and private life. We offer flexible working hours, in 2016 we set an on-site child care facility, and thanks to the modern technology we use our staff can work from home while staying connected to their colleagues. We encourage all to pursue their self-development in their line of work in order to become experts in specific domains. We support and organise educational activities at home or abroad. The opportunity to grow is provided to everyone which is obvious from the balanced ratio of women (48.5 %) and men (51.5 %) in managing posts.

The unique conditions for work, our status, and modern views provide for an ideal environment and energy to accept new challenges, and reach new limits. Our objective is to provide our citizens and public administration with maximal added value stemming from our work. The Supreme Audit Office´s project “3C – communication, comparison and cooperation” specially designed for EUROSAI presidency should enable us to accomplish this goal. That is our vision for EUROSAI.

For more information about the Supreme Audit Office see the website www.nku.cz.