Planning for Audit Impact

Achieving meaningful audit impact requires more than just conducting audits—it demands strategic and structured audit planning beforehand. The Planning for Audit Impact playbook is designed to help Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) shape their audit strategies to maximise value and contribute to stronger governance, accountability, effectiveness and inclusion.

This playbook walks SAIs through the key concepts of planning for audit impact, providing a practical, step-by-step approach to design a system and to develop their Strategic Audit Plans (SAP) and Annual Audit Plans (AAP). It offers insights into stablishing a sustainable, fit-for-purpose system for audit planning, integrating financial, compliance, and performance audits in a holistic manner.

The SAP sits one level below the overall Strategic Plan of the SAI and must be aligned with it, focusing on the SAI’s audit-related goals and priorities. The playbook breaks down the process of developing an SAP into its four components: the SAI’s audit impact value chain, a strategic audit portfolio, a plan of capacity development actions to implement the SAP, and a framework for monitoring, evaluation and learning. It also provides guidance for developing the AAP, which clarifies which audits and capacity development actions the SAI plans to deliver in a given year, along with the corresponding resources allocation.

With real-world and theoretical examples that can be tailored to different contexts and needs, this playbook ensures SAIs can effectively plan for relevant, timely, and high-impact audits.

Whether you are part of an SAI leadership team, a strategic audit planner, or a stakeholder supporting SAIs, this playbook is an essential resource. We invite you to share your experiences, best practices, and success stories to enrich future editions of this playbook. Your feedback on this pilot version will help us refine and enhance the final release—reach us at impact@idi.no.