Capacity building projects
The Office of the Auditor General has long been aktively involved in capacity building through a long-standing bilateral project as well as through Peer Reviews. As of 2007 the scope of our activities in this area are expanding through a collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Photo: The OAG of Norway
Capacity building
The OAG’s capacity-building efforts shall support goals for Norwegian development aid: democratisation and poverty reduction. For this purpose a cooperative agreement has been signed with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The OAG will focus mainly on institutional strengthening and shall strive to attain a long-term view of the assignments we take on.
Capacity-building efforts are mainly to be targeted at Norway’s partner countries and new democracies.
Bilateral capacity building project
In March 1998 the Offices of the Auditor Generals of Zambia and Norway entered into an agreement on capacity building of the
OAG Zambia. This agreement was renewed in May 2003.
The cooperation between the two SAIs has concentrated on areas such as:
- Development of Auditing Standards and Code of Ethics, Regularity Audit Guidelines and Audit Quality Control systems.
- Training of the staff in topics such as IT-Audit, the use of IT-tools, Regularity Audit Guidelines and Auditing Standards.
- Joint Audits, carried out to gain an understanding of previous and new methodology.
Peer reviews
Due to the nature of their work SAIs generally do not have institutions within their national boarders with whom to compare performance. To compensate for this SAIs throughout the world, have traditionally maintained close contact and provided each other with advice and assistance. Moreso, a need has emerged for more formal reviews of SAIs work in order to learn from each other’s experiences and so improve the quality of their work.
In 2005/06 the Office of the Auditor General led Peer Reviews of the SAIs of the Netherlands and Denmark. The report on the Danish SAI was completed in September 2006, see attached file. The UK led the Peer Review of the Office of the Auditor General's value for money audits and presented the attached report in 2005.