Opening audit information
The State Audit Institution announced that it will act on two initiatives of Transparency Serbia.
At the presentation of the thousand auditor's report, the President of the State Audit Institution and the State Auditor General, Duško Pejović, announced changes in the work of this institution, some of which are based on the proposals made by Transparency Serbia over the past years. Regarding the subject of audit reviews, he encouraged "all interested parties to come up with proposals on topics, because expert control of public finances is a matter for DRI, and the right to know how public money is spent is the right of all citizens."
In the opinion of the TS, this kind of encouragement should be accompanied by feedback on what has been done to the citizens and organizations that have indicated to the DRI about the problem.
In his speech, the General State Re. reflected directly on the recent proposal of Transparency Serbia to open data in the possession of the DRI so that it would be easier to use for the interested public - to all those who want to make comparisons by years and among the subjects of the audit, to analyze published data and to draw conclusions about public sector operations and audit effectiveness.
"In order to keep up with the times, we will open data from the Institution's report, with the exception of secret and private data, into machine-readable forms. The opening of the data is very important because in this way it significantly affects transparency, efficiency and economy. "In response to this announcement, Nemanja Nenadić, who attended this presentation, invited other state bodies to open data related to public finances, and legislators to prescribe such an obligation in the regulations.”The Public Procurement Law is the most current at the moment, and its draft provides for the public to publish much important information, but it should already be specified that it must be published in an open format," he said.
Another important change in the work of DRI, which is related to Transparency initiatives, is the publication of response reports on the DRI website. In connection with this, DRI has announced the creation of a form that would make it easier for audit entities to produce these reports because they have done so "in various ways, often incomplete, so the DRI had to seek additional evidence". The state auditor promised that the response reports to the 2018 audit reports will be published on the DRI website. We remind that Transparency initiated the publication of response reports because citizens currently have only information on what problems DRI has detected and what it recommended in this regard at their disposal, but not what the audited entities did afterwards.