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The SAI is an autonomous, independent institution and its objectives are
to protect State Public Funds, expose financial irregularities and
highlight deficiencies in financial laws. Its mandate is very wide
covering Commercial enterprises with government majority holding,
Pension Funds besides government ministries and departments.
Significantly the expanded audit mandate also covered the entire oil and
gas sector which forms the backbone of the Omani economy. These audits
required a high order of skills, which needs to be developed.
To cope with the new
requirements in the short-term, we availed of assistance from other SAIs
besides launching a major initiative for upgradation of skills of our
staff. We are now reaping the benefits of this initiative, with our
younger staff obtaining such professional certifications and taking on
increased responsibilities for challenging audits.
In addition the
Government of Oman is also changing rapidly, by adopting cutting-edge
technologies like e-governance. As an auditor, we are keeping pace by
modernising our institution..
Towards this objective,
we are moving our audit focus from our traditional compliance-based
approach to a value-for-money or performance based approach. We are also
modernising our audit methodology initiative, and introducing modern
Computer based tools like TeamMate towards this end.
We have also
re-oriented our relationship with our auditees, which tended to be
somewhat adversarial, to act more as an aid to management, in order to
optimise scarce Government resources
We have successfully
leveraged IT to add value to our administrative and audit management
processes, using intranet-based technologies. In addition, we have
developed considerable expertise in the analysis of computerised auditee
data, especially for our performance and investigative audits, using
modern tools like ACL.
We have been a
long-standing member of International Organisation of Supreme Audit
Institutions (INTOSAI), and are also members of both Arab Organisation
of Supreme Audit Institutions (ARABOSAI) and Asian Organisation of
Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI), in addition to INTOSAI’s Standing
Committees/ Working Groups on IT Audit, Internal Control and
Privatisation Audit. We have been sharing our experiences, by
conducting training courses for other SAIs. We have also led Research
projects for INTOSAI IT Audit Committee on “Intranets for SAIs” and on
CAATs.
Auditors the world over
need to update their skills and re-invent themselves to meet the
emerging challenges in their environments – both technological and
methodological. Internet provides a useful forum for such exchanges of
experiences and information. With these words, I commend our website to
our visitors.
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