For decades, governments worldwide have enacted laws and designed programmes intended to protect disadvantaged and vulnerable sections of the community, including the disabled, elderly, ethnic minorities and those living in poverty. The task of assessing whether these initiatives are translating into the right outcomes for the people they are meant to support falls to supreme audit institutions (SAIs).
For the past three years, the compliance audit subcommittee of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) has been working on developing a framework that could embed equality and inclusiveness into the compliance audit work of SAIs worldwide. That work has now produced what is described as a ‘landmark’ concept paper – an important step in achieving the central promise of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: to leave no one behind.
Practical route
The concept paper has been developed collaboratively by the SAIs of India, Brazil, France, Norway and Russia, and has taken into account a survey of 10 SAIs worldwide in order to find a practical route forward for the global SAI community.
Challenges include the difficulty of engaging marginalised communities
The paper details 14 real-life case studies from SAIs across the globe, including compliance audits of residential care for the elderly in Hungary, and economic support schemes for tribal communities in India.
The SAIs taking part in the survey highlighted a number of challenges they encountered during their work, including limited availability of disaggregated data, the absence of dedicated audit teams and the difficulty of engaging marginalised communities.
These case studies, says the paper, highlight the difficulty with equality and inclusiveness policies – that despite the existence of legal frameworks and funding allocations, there is often a wide gap between policy intent and the lived reality. ‘It is precisely in that distance,’ it says, ‘that compliance auditors have a role to play.’
The paper argues that compliance auditing ‘is one of the most direct instruments available to SAIs for holding governments accountable on equality’. It takes the approach that compliance auditing of equality and inclusiveness policies should not be seen as niche or specialised, but as an extension of what SAIs already do.
Compliance framework
The concept paper puts forward a suggested framework for compliance audits, recommending that SAIs ask targeted questions around equality and inclusiveness at the entity, programme and sector levels.
The paper introduces the concept of intersectionality as an audit consideration
In practice, this would mean SAIs assessing whether an organisation has functional equality policies, inclusive governance structures, equitable resource allocation practices and accessible grievance mechanisms.
At the programme level, it would mean looking closely at whether schemes such as educational scholarships or housing subsidies are meeting their intended beneficiaries quickly and effectively, and are free from fraud. And at the sector level, SAIs should look for ‘systemic inequities’ in health, education, housing and labour systems ‘that no single programme audit would reveal’.
The paper also introduces the concept of intersectionality as an audit consideration, which recognises that some people may face overlapping forms of disadvantage at the same time, and that audits designed around single exclusionary factors may miss the compound effect of multiple vulnerabilities.
Call for standardisation
The paper’s recommendations echo the way forward identified by the SAIs that took part in the survey; all call for further standardisation of the way SAIs audit issues of equality and inclusiveness.
‘The impact of exclusion drivers makes it necessary for SAIs to play a critical role’
The SAIs surveyed make a number of suggestions, including the development of guidance notes, self-learning modules, regular staff training, and more platforms where best practices and innovations could be shared. They also supported greater collaboration with government agencies and marginalised communities in order to improve audit quality and relevance.
‘The impact of exclusion drivers on individuals and society, as a whole, makes it necessary for SAIs to play a critical role in detecting exclusion disparities and evaluating the steps taken by Government in promoting equality and inclusiveness,’ says the paper. A comprehensive set of auditing guidelines that establish a framework for assessing the impact of interventions, it adds, is essential so that SAIs can keep a check to ensure public resources are distributed equitably.
