Cooperating with the EUROSAI Working Group on Environmental Auditing
Only looking at the sheer number of members for working groups of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) cooperating on policy areas, the area that tends to be most popular by far is ‘environmental auditing.’ Started within the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) in 1992, the INTOSAI working group in this area currently has 72 members. INTOSAI’s regional branch in Europe, EUROSAI, shows similar levels of interest. Samo Jereb, ECA Member, who acted as rapporteur for several reports related to environmental issues and represented the ECA in several EUROSAI meetings on this topic, and Jerneja Vrabic, working in his Private Office, provide insights on the main activities of the EUROSAI Working Group on Environmental Auditing (WGEA) and the way European SAIs cooperate in this area.
By Samo Jereb, ECA Member and Jerneja Vrabic, Private Office of Samo Jereb
The EUROSAI WGEA …
…is a source of inspiration
…is a forum for cooperation and experience sharing
…provides updated information and knowledge from experts
EUROSAI WGEA at a glance
The Working Group on Environmental Auditing (WGEA) of the European Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (EUROSAI) functions as a regional branch under the umbrella of INTOSAI Working Group on Environmental Auditing (INTOSAI WGEA). Established almost twenty years ago, in 1999, the EUROSAI WGEA is a network of European environmental auditors working in 42 SAIs. It is lead by a steering committee, whose purpose is to provide strategic direction and operational support to the work of the EWGEA. Currently, the Steering Committee consists of nine member SAIs (Cyprus, Estonia, the European Court of Auditors, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Ukraine) and is chaired by the SAI of Estonia.
The EUROSAI WGEA has adopted the vision of the equivalent at global level, the I WGEA of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions. The EUROSAI WGEA and its members share a commitment to use the power of public sector audits to leave a positive legacy for future generations by improving the management of natural resources and the environment, and the health and prosperity of the people of Europe. According to the Working plan for the period 2017–2020, the EUROSAI WGEA aims to encourage and support cooperation among and outside the SAI community, and facilitate knowledge and experience sharing on common environmental auditing topics, tools and methods. To do so the working group has formulated two the main strategic goals: to encourage and support professional cooperation and to facilitate knowledge and experience sharing.
The EUROSAI WGEA follows global matters, such as sustainable development, climate change and environmental health, while focusing its activities on regionally relevant environmental auditing issues, as identified by its members.The group promotes cooperation within its members, in wider SAI community (e.g. EUROSAI, INTOSAI, regional working groups), as well as with external partners (e.g. different European Union institutions). The major possibilities to cooperate through sharing experience at annual meetings, seminars and trainings, by contributing to the newsletter and to cooperative audits.
Annual meetings, spring sessions, training seminars …
…usually cover the topics identified based on members’ feedback and agreed by the Steering Committee. Through the years, these seminars have covered a long series of environmental topics, such as climate change, land use and development, market based instruments in environmental protection, industrial waste and chemicals, biodiversity, sustainable land use and sustainable development. The methodological and cross-cutting issues of recent annual meetings were, among other things:
- how to increase the impact of environmental audit;
- introducing greening activities to the SAIs;
- implementing ISSAIs on environmental auditing;
- how to reach the stakeholders;
- conducting surveys and data analysis;
- assessing validity and reliability in quantitative and qualitative analyses.
At these meetings and seminars, invited external speakers usually present the theoretical part of the topics, whereas participants from SAIs present and share their experience on auditing these issues. Usually, the main topics are divided further to cover more specific issues through separate sessions and working in groups, offering participants additional opportunities to discuss issues more in depth.
Each year the ECA actively participate at meetings and seminars, both by presenting its work and leading the discussions on selected topics. At the 2018 the annual meeting in Bratislava, Robert Markus, principal manager at the ECA, gave a presentation on ‘Auditing climate change at European Union level — ECA’s perspective.’
The Working Group’s ‘Spring Sessions’ are thematic seminars generally held in April for sharing experience on common auditing issues. In the past five years the topics of the spring sessions were the auditing of different aspects of water quality and management, recycling, energy efficiency, energy savings and renewable energy, sustainable forest and fisheries management. The 2018 spring session, organized in Helsinki, covered environmental governance, both at the state and European level. A particular focus of the seminar was the concept of good governance, with the environment as its specific point of reference.
ECA colleague Vivi Niemenmaa contributed to the seminar by leading discussion sessions on how to conduct an audit in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Conducting Cooperative audits…
…can further enhance members’ abilities to conduct environmental audits through sharing good audit practices and adding value to national findings by putting them into broader international context. Cooperative audits are valuable for SAIs to address important environmental and climate subjects, especially where international commitments are involved. One difficulty when conducting cooperative audits that might slow down their execution is that SAIs have different mandates, procedures and timeframes for performing their audits. In the period 2017–2020 the members of the Working Group have conducted three cooperative audits:
- Energy Efficiency in Public Buildings.This audit was co-led by the SAIs of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the resulting joint report was published in September 2018;
- Multilateral Environmental Agreements on Air Pollution. Cco-led by the SAIs of the Netherlands and Poland, publication of the joint report is foreseen in December 2018;
- Mediterranean Marine Protected Areas. The audit is co-led by the SAIs of Cyprus and
The ECA participated in a cooperative audit on air pollution involving 15 other SAIs. We find such cooperation very fruitful, as the ECA’s audit findings on activities of EU Institutions and selected Member States werebe complemented with the findings of other participating SAIs in the cooperative audit.
The WGEA Newsletter…
…is another way of sharing important information on environmental activities among the members of the WGEA. It is published biannually, usually presenting an emerging environmental topic and bringing the information about the Working Group’s past and future activities and information about published environmental audit reports and other environmental activities. The ECA actively contributes to this newsletter by preparing short articles about its published environmental audits. For the next edition of the WGEA Newsletter, ECA has contributed through an article about its environmental audit activities, presenting the audits we published, the environmental seminar for auditors held at the ECA at the end of September 2018, and its views on conducting further cooperative audits.
Further Cooperation with the EUROSAI WGEA
We consider the ongoing cooperation with the EUROSAI WGEA to be very positive and fruitful for the parties involved. The ECA can gain experience from international experts in environmental auditing and can share valuable audit experience with other national SAIs. With this in mind, the ECA will host an annual WGEA meeting next autumn. The main topic will be auditing biodiversity, an area on which we also focus in our current audit programme. As ECA we have well established contacts with other EU institutions operating on environmental policies. We hope that this will help us to engage high profile external speakers and make for an interesting and stimulating meeting next year here in Luxembourg.
A possible venue for further cooperation with and within the EUROSAI WGEA could be to develop ways of conducting cooperative audits with greater impact. By combining and complementing findings on auditing national environmental policies from SAIs — especially those from EU Member States — , with ECA’s findings on activities of the European Commission, we can cover more cross-border issues, present more comprehensive case studies and therefore provide more relevant recommendations.
Another way might be promoting specific audit activities under a specific theme, for example how countries deliver on their commitments under certain International Agreements, or by developing common audit questions and a common approach. As the result of audits focusing at the national dimension, the EUROSAI WGEA could produce several snapshots bringing together emerging issues from the SAI’s work, perhaps even reporting them in a common format.
As the current work with the EUROSAI WGEA showed the benefits for the ECA’s work, we expect further cooperation to enhance the current mutual benefits and to develop new ways for exchanging knowledge and expertise and conducting cooperative audits, cooperation all aimed at improving the impact of environmental policies and actions.
This article was first published on the November-December 2018 issue of the ECA Journal. The contents of the interviews and the articles are the sole responsibility of the interviewees and authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Court of Auditors.
