The National Audit Office (NAO) participated in the 18th Working Group Meeting on Audit Rules of the Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, which was held at the headquarters of the Council’s General Secretariat in Riyadh.
At their meeting in November 2019, the Heads of SAIs in the GCC assigned the working group to update and review previously issued joint audit manuals and prepare a manual on "Auditing in the Light of Disasters and Crises".
The NAO was represented at the Working Group meeting by May Alkhulaif, Audit Manager at the Regularity Audit Directorate, and Yusuf Aljawder, Audit Supervisor at the Administrative Audit Directorate.
The meeting included a presentation of the reviewed joint work manuals on “Auditing Oil and Gas entities”, “Pre-monitoring”, “Examining Zakat and Tax Revenues”, “Preparing and Writing Audit Reports”, “Information Technology Audit”, and Audit of Privatizations”, and a presentation on the general outline of the manual on “Auditing in Light of Disasters and Crises” prepared by the Kuwait’s State Audit Bureau.
The participants advised that for preparing manuals issued by the General Secretariat a unified methodology for their introduction, objectives and scope was needed and that it should fit in with the approved general framework for joint audit manuals of the SAIs in the GCC.
The working group agreed to hold its next meeting in August 2022 to discuss the final drafts of the manuals after including the latest amendments, and to discuss the updates of the “Performance Audit” manual currently under review by the NAO of the Kingdom of Bahrain, and to examine the work plan for preparing the manual on “Auditing in Light of Disasters and Crises”.
