The Quality Assurance Programme is one of the elements of Results Framework under 3i Programme Phase II-ISSAI Implementation Initiative. At the IDI, independent quality assurance is considered as the most critical phase in the ISSAI Implementation process, which will help the SAIs to ascertain the compliance with applicable ISSAIs in their audits. As the first step in this programme, the IDI aimed to create a pool of QA reviewers, who can be used by the IDI, regions and SAIs to support various initiatives related to quality assurance.
In order to create this pool of QA reviewers, a week-long workshop on Quality Assurance was held in Tbilisi, Georgia from 6-10 November 2017, which was hosted by the State Audit Office of Georgia. A total of 55 participants from 22 countries of five INTOSAI English speaking regions participated in the workshop.
The workshop among others covered different elements of Quality Control Systems within the SAIs, different models and approaches of setting up a QA function and conducting QA review at the institutional level and audit engagement level. 50% of the workshop duration was utilised for providing a comprehensive hands-on-practice on how to use draft QA tools on compliance, financial, and performance audits developed by the IDI. During the practical session, the participants conducted a QA review of audit files which they brought from their SAIs in three different sub-groups of compliance, financial, and performance audits. The session also covered writing a QA review report, and how to form a conclusion on QA review.
On asking participants how they found the workshop, they submitted that for some of them it was an eye-opening on how the QA function works and that there were different approaches of conducting the QA, while most of them appreciated and embraced the functionality of QA tool for financial, compliance, and performance audits.
