Our international engagement
The Office of the Auditor General is involved in a wide range of international work. We participate in international organisations for supreme audit institutions and in partnerships to strengthen supreme audit institutions in weak democracies, in addition to undertaking audit assignments for international organisations.
Our international engagement has two main objectives:
- We will strengthen the standing of public auditing internationally. We achieve this in particular by providing technical support to supreme audit institutions in developing countries and by contributing to the work of establishing good international standards for public auditing.
- We will ensure learning and development through professional dialogue. Sharing experiences and knowledge are fundamental for the development of our own business.
Development of public auditing
Internationally, most of the development work on public auditing is done through INTOSAI17 – the global umbrella organisation for supreme audit institutions. INTOSAI develops auditing standards and a common international framework for public auditing.
We contribute to INTOSAI in a number of ways. The chair of the Board of Auditors General is a member of the board of INTOSAI. In addition, we head the overarching coordinating body for the further development of international standards for public auditing, and we are represented on the committees responsible for developing standards for financial auditing, performance auditing and compliance auditing.
We also sit on a number of other INTOSAI committees and working groups that are particularly relevant to our work.
Collaboration with the other Nordic supreme audit institutions is a priority.
Through INTOSAI, we also collaborate with supreme audit institutions that are at the forefront in areas such as data analysis, visualisation, and the use and auditing of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Professional support to partner institutions
Common international standards on auditing provide us with a good point of departure for assisting other countries’ supreme audit institutions in their work to improve the management of public resources.
Through our collaboration, we aim to contribute to the development of strategies, methods and plans to strengthen the institutions. We provide support in areas such as:
- Strengthen institutions
- Developing IT audit
- Audits of resource management
We have bilateral institutional cooperation with the supreme audit institutions of Uganda and Albania. We have also continued our work to ensure regional anchoring via our close collaboration with AFROSAI-E, the African organisation of English-speaking Supreme Audit Institutions in Southern Africa.
We have a new institutional collaboration with the State Audit Office of North Macedonia and entered into a collaboration agreement with the Office of the Auditor-General of Namibia.
We also collaborate with other countries’ supreme audit institutions through the INTOSAI Development Initiative (IDI).