Tag Archives: supreme audit institutions

What Will It Take To Pass the Sri Lankan Audit Bill?

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Regular, effective auditing of public programs by an independent body is widely recognized as a crucial anticorruption tool. Yet in Sri Lanka, the legal framework that would enable such effective auditing is still not in place. Although Sri Lanka’s Auditor General’s Department (AG) has been in operation for more than 200 years, it derives most of its functions from executive practice and regulations, rather than legislation. For this reason, the office is largely toothless: It cannot take any action to enforce its findings beyond submitting reports to two parliamentary committees, but these have little to no impact, as any follow-up actions are largely dependent on executive discretion. For years, experts and citizens alike have recognized the urgent need for a National Audit Law to govern and empower the Auditor General’s Department.

Yet despite repeated efforts and a constitutional mandate, the government has still not succeeded in enacting such a robust statutory framework to govern public audits. A National Audit Bill has been in the process of “being drafted” since the early 2000s, but an actual draft bill didn’t appear until 2013. No further action was taken on that bill. When President Sirisena took office in January 2015, he declared that the government would pass a National Audit Act by March 2015 as part of his 100-day programme. But although a new Audit Bill was proposed to Cabinet in April 2015, the proposal was deferred by the Cabinet a shocking 24 times, up until October 2017. Eventually, there were encouraging reports that the “impasse” had ended and that the Audit Bill had been approved by the Cabinet. But it was not to be: it turned out that what had been approved were amendments to the proposed bill, and not the bill itself. Subsequently, the government stated that it will not be submitting the Bill to Parliament – back to square one.

Why the seemingly interminable delay? It appears that the main reason for the impasse, at least since 2015, is a contentious section which vests the AG with the power to impose a surcharge—that is, to disallow public expenditure and require monies found to have been used improperly to be refunded by the guilty parties. This has met with resistance, mainly because it would take decisions concerning enforcement out of the hands of politicians. (Opponents of the bill also claim that it would hinder the carrying out of public duties by politicians, such as when urgent funds are required to respond to natural calamities.) Yet many reformers insist that giving the AG the surcharge power is necessary and non-negotiable.

If progress on the Audit Bill is to move forward, something has got to give. In my view, despite all the policy arguments for granting the AG the surcharge power, it’s better to move ahead and enact an Audit Act that lacks this provision, rather than allowing this sticking point to further hold up its passage. This is one of those situations where we can’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Continue reading →

In the Excitement of the New, Let’s Not Neglect the Tried and True

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In my two posts last week (here and here), I attempted to go through all of the 41 country statements submitted by the participants in the London Anticorruption Summit held earlier this month, to see what those statements had to say about four specific issue areas highlighted by the Summit’s joint Communique: (1) accessibility (and possibly transparency) of beneficial ownership information for companies and other legal entities, (2) public procurement transparency, (3) independence, effectiveness, and transparency of national audit institutions, and (4) whistleblower protection (and encouragement). I didn’t originally intend to say much more about this, other than putting the information out there for others to examine, but on writing up the summaries, I was struck by the following observation:

Of the four issue areas I picked out–all of which, again, were prominently featured in the Communique–I would characterize two (beneficial ownership and, to a somewhat lesser extent, procurement transparency) as relatively “new” topics that have generated a lot of excitement. (This is clearly the case for beneficial ownership; public procurement transparency has been on the agenda for much longer, though I put it in this category because a lot of the focus of discussion in this area has been on relatively new initiatives like e-procurement and the Open Contracting Data Standard.) The other two issues I chose to highlight–independent and competent audits of government programs, and adequate protection of (and, preferably, affirmative encouragement for) whistleblowers–have been part of the conversation for considerably longer, though that doesn’t mean we’ve yet seen anywhere near as much movement on either of those issues as we’d like. And, compared to the newness and (relative) sexiness of topics like beneficial ownership registries and e-procurement initiatives, whistleblower protection and audits seem a bit humdrum. (Audits especially. Even I get bored when I hear the word “audit,” and I happen to think they’re really important.)

The thing that struck me, when going through the country statements, was the dramatic lopsidedness of the attention lavished on beneficial ownership and procurement transparency (to say nothing of other topics I didn’t cover, like corruption in sports and improved asset recovery mechanisms), compared to the relative neglect of country commitments in the areas of improving national audit institutions and whistleblower protections. Continue reading →

London Anticorruption Summit–Country Commitment Scorecard, Part 1

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Well, between the ICIJ release of the searchable Panama Papers/Offshore Leaks database, the impeachment of President Rousseff in Brazil, and the London Anticorruption Summit, last week was quite a busy week in the world of anticorruption. There’s far too much to write about, and I’ve barely had time to process it all, but let me try to start off by focusing a bit more on the London Summit. I know a lot of our readers have been following it closely (and many participated), but quickly: The Summit was an initiative by David Cameron’s government, which brought together leaders and senior government representatives from over 40 countries to discuss how to move forward in the fight against global corruption. Some had very high hopes for the Summit, others dismissed it as a feel-good political symbolism, and others were somewhere in between.

Prime Minister Cameron stirred things up a bit right before the Summit started by referring to two of the countries in attendance – Afghanistan and Nigeria – as “fantastically corrupt,” but the kerfuffle surrounding that alleged gaffe has already received more than its fair share of media attention, so I won’t say more about it here, except that it calls to mind the American political commentator Michael Kinsley’s old chestnut about how the definition of a “gaffe” is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.) I’m going to instead focus on the main documents coming out of the Summit: The joint Communique issued by the Summit participants, and the individual country statements. There’s already been a lot of early reaction to the Communique—some fairly upbeat, some quite critical (see, for example, here, here, here, and here). A lot of the Communique employs fairly general language, and a lot of it focuses on things like strengthening enforcement of existing laws, improving international cooperation and information exchange, supporting existing institutions and conventions, and exploring the creation of new mechanisms. All that is fine, and some of it might actually turn out to be consequential, but to my mind the most interesting parts of the Communique are those that explicitly announce that intention of the participating governments to take pro-transparency measures in four specific areas:

  1. Gathering more information on the true beneficial owners of companies (and possibly other legal entities, like trusts), perhaps through a central public registry—which might be available only to law enforcement, or which might be made available to the general public (see Communique paragraph 4).
  2. Increasing transparency in public contracting, including making public procurement open by default, and providing usable and timely open data on public contracting activities (see Communique paragraph 9). (There’s actually a bit of an ambiguity here. When the Communique calls for public procurement to be “open by default,” it could be referring to greater transparency, or it could be calling for the use of open bidding processes to increase competition. Given the surrounding context, it appears that the former meaning was intended. The thrust of the recommendation seems to be increasing procurement transparency rather than increasing procurement competition.)
  3. Increasing budget transparency through the strengthening of genuinely independent supreme audit institutions, and the publication of these institutions’ findings (see Communique paragraph 10).
  4. Strengthening protections for whistleblowers and doing more to ensure that credible whistleblower reports prompt follow-up action from law enforcement (see Communique paragraph 13).

Again, that’s far from all that’s included in the Communique. But these four action areas struck me as (a) consequential, and (b) among the parts of the Communique that called for relatively concrete new substantive action at the domestic level. So, I thought it might be a useful (if somewhat tedious) exercise to go through each of the 41 country statements to see what each of the Summit participants had to say in each of these four areas. This is certainly not a complete “report card,” despite the title of this post, but perhaps it might be a helpful start for others out there who are interested in doing an assessment of the extent of actual country commitments on some of the main action items laid out in the Communique. So, here goes: a country-by-country, topic-by-topic, quick-and-dirty summary of what the Summit participants declared or promised with respect to each of these issues. (Because this is so long, I’m going to break the post into two parts. Today I’ll give the info for Afghanistan–Malta, and Thursday’s post will give the info for Mexico–United States). Continue reading →