Best Performance Audit Report

The SNAO Prize for the Best Performance Audit Report 2011

Performance audit is one of the imperatives of AFROSAI-E. To promote the development of performance audit, AFROSAI-E has, in cooperation with the Swedish National Audit Office (SNAO), launched the SNAO Prize for the best performance audit report of the year.

The purpose of the prize is to promote sharing of experiences and benchmarking best practice in performance audit but also to highlight the efforts of performance auditors within the region.

The prize will be handed over at the AFROSAI-E board meeting next year.

Nominating a report

Each SAI within AFROSAI-E is invited to nominate one performance audit report for assessment. The report should be sent to the performance audit manager of the AFROSAI-E Secretariat, Mr Lars Florin, at larsf [at] agsa [dot] co [dot] za, and should arrive not later than 15 December 2011. Reports arriving after that date will not be considered.

When sending in the report, the following information should be added:

The members of the audit team (a maximum of three auditors may be rewarded).
An assurance from the Auditor-General that the entire or virtually entire report had been produced by the SAI’s own auditors and was not the result of audit work contracted out by the SAI. The assurance should also be given that the performance audit report had been finalized and approved by the SAI. The final report should have been made public or sent to the parliament for tabling or to the auditee. (If the SAI decide to join the competition with a report that hasn’t been made public they have to be aware that the winning report will be publicized on the AFROSAI-E/PA webpage after the board meeting in April.)
Data on the production time of the audit (from the decision to carry out a pre-study up to that the final report been approved by the SAI). Reports with a production time exceeding 12 months will not be considered.

Assessing the reports

A formal assessment of the reports will be conducted at the AFROSAI-E Secretariat, ensuring that they meet the formal requirements. No quality assessment will be performed at the Secretariat. If too few reports are submitted to the Secretariat it may decide to cancel the competition for that year.

The quality of the performance audit reports will be assessed by a review team appointed by the SNAO consisting of members from the SNAO as well as other SAIs. One person from SNAO will act as chairperson. AFROSAI-E members or members of the AFROSAI-E Secretariat will not be part of the team.

The assessment will be performed based on the Lima declaration, the INTOSAI Implementation Guidelines for performance audit, the INTOSAI Ethical Code of Ethics and Auditing Standards as well as the AFROSAI-E performance audit template manual.

The review team will conduct its assessment solely on the basis of the performance audit reports. No other material such as pre-studies etc. will form part of the assessment.

If no report is deemed to be of reasonable quality, the review team may decide not to select a winner for that year.

The decision of the review team is final.

Award

The review team will choose one winner as the best performance audit report of the year. The winner will be announced at the annual AFROSAI-E Board meeting 2012. The review team will motivate its decision.

The prize will be awarded to the audit team which must consist of not more than three performance auditors. The prize includes one week’s deployment to the Swedish National Audit Office where travel fees, hotel costs and expenses for meals will be paid according to Swedish regulations. During such deployment the winners are also expected to present their report to the performance auditors of SNAO.

The winners will receive a trophy.

The review team may award honourable mention to other reports and teams.

Information