The third day of the Congress is over. It was full of important events and special for us as today Aleksei Kudrin, the head of the Accounts Chamber, has assumed the office of the Chair of the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI).

This means that in the next three years the SAI Russia will head one of the biggest international organizations and shape the global audit agenda.

Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, Sergei Sobyanin, Mayor of Moscow, and representatives from the chambers of the Federal Assembly, congratulated the Accounts Chamber with the chairmanship in INTOSAI.

The key moment of the ceremony was the passing of the INTOSAI symbol to the Russian Federation as Aleksei Kudrin received a wooden gavel from H.E. Harib Saeed Al Amimi, the former President of INTOSAI.

Immediately after the inauguration ceremony, Aleksei Kudrin as the INTOSAI Chair opened the first general plenary session of the Congress. He made a statement before the delegates and described the main priorities of the Accounts Chamber for the period of the INTOSAI Chairmanship, for example continuous dialogue, strategic approach and openness, big data and development of education programmes.

An official ceremony of postal stamp cancellation dedicated to INCOSAI XXIII also took place on Wednesday. The issue of the stamp was 150,000. The stamp was cancelled with a special souvenir date stamp with the date of main event, namely the inauguration of Russia as the Chair of INTOSAI that took place on September, 25, 2019. After the ceremony, Oleg Dukhovnitsky, the head of the Federal Agency of Communication, presented the members of the Presidium with commemorative frames with cancelled stamps.

Discussion panels with external experts organized by the Accounts Chamber within the framework of the Congress are among other highlights of the INCOSAI.

The first panel was dedicated to macroaudit. Aleksei Kudrin, the Chairman of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation; Ksenia Yudaeva, the First Deputy Governor of the Bank of Russia; Kenneth Rogoff, economy professor from Harvard; Vinay Patrick Saldanha, Director, Regional Support Team for Eastern Europe and Central Asia (UNAIDS) contributed to the discussion as experts.

The participants discussed global risks and challenges of today's world, talked about what the state should do to make the life of people better and about the role of the auditing community in the changing world.

The second panel session was dedicated to the problem of maintaining sustainable development in the age of Great Disruption. Herman Gref, CEO in Sberbank; Sergei Sobyanin, Mayor of Moscow; Philippe Rogge, Regional Vice President in Microsoft (Central and Eastern Europe); Augusto Lopez-Claros, the Director of the Global Indicators Group in the World Bank (2011-2017) and other high-profile experts participated in the panel.

The participants addressed various questions, for example what the age of Great Disruption was and how we could deliver good performance when the existing standards were being sidelined and new ones had not been developed yet.

Tomorrow the INCOSAI continues its work with panel session on the main Themes of the Congress.