IDI’s Summits kickstart a global conversation: 'What is Audit impact?'

“What success stories of high impact audits or audit practices do SAIs have? And what led to their success?”

In two recent global summits, IDI brought together 92 SAIs from across the world to answer these questions and more in the conversation: “What is audit impact?”

As a contribution to the effort for achieving greater audit impact, IDI is launching a ‘Facilitating Audit Impact’ initiative. The two summits launched this initiative by bringing together SAI leadership and key stakeholders to explore the dimensions of audit impact, share success stories from achieving such impact and discuss paths to enhance audit impact.  

SAIs highlighted their high impact audits and/or audit practices during the summits. In addition, SAIs and external stakeholders reflected upon good practices of strong stakeholder coalitions and robust follow-up systems.

Altogether, 17 SAIs shared success stories that were diverse, covered many local contexts, and were at different ends of the impact spectrum. Stories included examples of high impact financial audits, compliance audits and performance audits, as well as audit practices related to other areas such as stakeholder engagement and follow-up.

In addition, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) shared reflections on high impact audits that they have seen and how parliaments may contribute to high impact audits. Likewise, the International Budget Partnership (IBP) provided reflections on the role of civil society organisations in contributing to audit impact and some examples from partner countries of high impact audits. Good practices for follow-up systems were also presented from the EUROSAI Project Group on Follow up Systems. You can read their report here.

IDI would like to thank all the speakers, moderators and participants for their contributions to this conversation opener on “What is Audit Impact?”

Want to read more about IDI’s initiative for Facilitating Audit impact? You can read our strategy here.

You can also listen to the success stories from both days, in several languages, by selecting the video from the table below.