NIK President Marian Banaś visited his counterpart in Israel, State Comptroller and Ombudsman Matanyahu Englman. During the meeting the two SAI Heads talked among others about long-term cooperation between the SAIs and its impact on effective state audit which has to be independent from the executive power. The Presidents of both SAIs also addressed long-term audit strategies and strategic planning in their institutions, the need to care about physical- and cybersecurity of citizens. Statistics show that government organisations – including also personal data bases, databases with sensitive data from the medical sector and banking databases in those systems – are most frequent targets of computer hackers in Israel and the SAI Head also plays the role of the Ombudsman and is responsible for the protection of whistleblowers.
The Heads of Polish and Israeli SAIs talked about their institutions’ independence and the independence pillars set out e.g. in the Resolutions of the United Nations Organisation and the Lima Declaration on auditing principles as well as the Mexico Declaration on independence of Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs).
The key pillars of SAI’s independence include:
- independence of financial resources;
- independence of human resources recruitment;
- freedom of action and selection of audit subjects;
- freedom of access to information in the course of audits;
- effective mechanisms of monitoring audit recommendations and guidelines.
The State Comptroller and Ombudsman of Israel declared that all the pillars are guaranteed in Israel.
NIK President invited the State Comptroller and Ombudsman of Israel to visit Poland to strengthen cooperation of both SAIs.
