Real-time Auditing: A Tool to Enhance Good Governance and Accountability for Public Funds

What the paper says

Real-time audits can complement and add to the scope of work undertaken by national, state and local audit organizations, providing timely insights and enhancing oversight and decision-making. As reflected in the INTOSAI Journal’s recent discussion of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, real-time audits helped to track contracts, funding, and services. Against the backdrop of the pandemic as well as tracking government interventions after financial crises and responding to natural disaster recovery efforts, real-time auditing experience offers lessons learned about how Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) can contribute to good governance and accountability for public funds. All organizations need to periodically adapt to remain relevant and audit offices are not an exception. Audit offices are uniquely situated to provide insights into government spending and project outcomes. As such they benefit from public trust to provide objective, fact-based reports. However, audit offices must also periodically reinvent themselves as technology and software advances, permitting data mining on increasingly available information on program outcomes; likewise, gains from carefully employing artificial intelligence (AI) offer other possibilities. These advances also mean that policy makers and the public can become impatient for audit results to become available. Audit organizations are also competing for talent. The opportunity to work on real-time challenges that can have a more immediate impact on program operations can help with hiring and retaining team members.