The Audit Service issued an announcement regarding the decision of the Council of Ministers to transform the Audit Service into an Audit Board. announcement of the Audit Service:
On 26.4.2024, the day the Attorney General registered the application for the dismissal of the Auditor General, in his announcement the Auditor General had mentioned that we will have to deal with two fronts of the Government and the Legal Service at the same time. Yesterday's Decision of the Council of Ministers is apparently an attempt to silence the Auditor General. The word modernization is used by the Government for communication purposes. To modernize means to make something old modern. The Cyprus model is the most widespread and successful worldwide and is followed by most EU countries, but also by other countries with a very long tradition of external control of Governments such as the USA, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Israel, and dozens of others. Sweden had an audit board and in 2020 changed it to a Cyprus model. So, what is being attempted is not modernization but regression with the goal of cycling.
The President of the Republic, in his cross-channel interview on 5.3.2024, had stated the following:
“The same with all institutions, including the Legal Service and the Audit Service. And I want to make something clear, to prevent any reactions. There is nothing personal. And this whole process that we are doing and will present publicly, Mr. Tsouroulis, after discussing with the institutions themselves, touches on a period of time, during which the specific individuals will not exist or will be at the end, if you like, of their term of office . Why? Because for us it is not a personal matter. For us, the issue is institutional.”
It is obvious that for the Government the issue is personal and not institutional. For us, however, it is institutional and this is the reason we will oppose with every legal means this attempt by the Government to undermine our Service.
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No international study and no report of an international organization has ever suggested changing the model of the Audit Service from a single person to a multi-person one. In the recent reports of GRECO and the Commission on the Rule of Law, there are only positive reports about our Service and no suggestion for change, other than recording the problems that the Government itself creates for us with our unfettered access to information.< br />GRECO even states that “the Auditor General has demonstrated a critical role as an external auditor of public services.” The Government has before it only one recommendation from an international organization regarding the legal framework governing the Audit Service. This concerns the pre-accession requirement of the European Commission to ensure the financial independence of our Service, a requirement that was also included in the Memorandum with the Troika.
The Audit Service has been transformed in the last 10 years and is already unrecognizable. In 2015 we did structured self-assessment, in 2016 we brought in the UK Audit Office for peer review. What our British colleagues had recommended to us was the establishment of a management team and this has been done since 2019.
All reports are approved by the Management Team. Therefore, collectivity already exists. We passed the test of the Common Assessment Framework and recently joined, together with the Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) of 11 other countries worldwide, in an INTOSAI pilot program aimed at supporting SAIs in designing and implementing an audit quality management system based on new quality management standard for HEIs, to be implemented in 2025. INTOSAI, in a recent letter, highlighted the “impressive progress made by the Audit Service in the field of audit methodology”.
From an Audit A backwater service, which was essentially applying international standards partially and piecemeal, we are now a high-level Service that is moving steadily towards professional excellence.
If the Government insists and such a bill is indeed tabled, we intend to address all parliamentary parties. We believe that everyone will realize that what is being attempted is unprecedented.
Our last line of defense will be the Constitution and the fact that the model of our Service is provided for in a fundamental article. The first paragraph of article 115 specifies that only two officials serve in the Audit Service, the Auditor General and the Assistant Auditor General. This paragraph is included in Appendix III and based on article 182, what is in this Appendix are fundamental articles of the Constitution and cannot, in any way, be modified by alteration, addition or repeal.
