Twinning is a European Union instrument for cooperation among EU member states and its partner countries, intended for the EU candidate and potential candidate countries and for European Neighborhood Policy. The project was implemented by a German-Polish consortium led by the German Supreme Audit Institution – Bundesrechnungshof (BRH) and supported by the Polish Supreme Audit Office – Najwyższa Izba Kontroli (NIK).
The project provided assistance under the European Neighborhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI), which supports democratic development, the rule of law and effective governance in line with the Article 1.2 of the Georgia-EU Association Agreement to „promote democracy and political, economic and institutional stability in Georgia.“ The project enhanced the management and technical capacity of the SAOG to plan and conduct audits with international standards and methodologies.
Project outcomes:
- The organizational and resource management of the SAO has been strengthened, as well as structure of the SAO has been updated.
- Strategic development plan of SAO, annual action plan, audit plan and budget planning procedures have been reviewed.
- Methodologies were developed.
- SAO has updated its compliance and financial audit approaches, thereby separating financial and compliance audits from one another.
- SAO has started using a risk-based audit strategy for planning and conducting the audit.
- The IT audit has commenced.
- Monitoring procedure for audit recommendations has been revised and updated.
- The Parliamentary group reviewing the audit reports has been set up within the Budget and Finance Committee of the Parliament of Georgia to ensure the implementation of the recommendations issued by the SAO.
- The implementation of the Audit Management System (AMS) has started.
- Staff performance appraisal system has been introduced and a pilot evaluation was carried out.
- In close cooperation with the LEPL Public Audit Institute (PAI), qualification raising areas of the employees has been defined.
- High level knowledge and experience sharing meetings, both for the SAO and for the MEPs in the Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) of Germany and Poland have been convened.
- Under the guidance of the German and Polish experts, 26 steering committee meetings and 53 missions of the German and Polish experts took place, and the SAO staff received training in various areas during the project implementation.
