On September 22, 2021 the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation held a multilateral seminar “Audit of openness and openness in audit”. That was the third meeting in the series of seminars on SAI Openness, held by the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation in 2021.

During the meeting SAIs representatives from Canada, Russia and the UK discussed Government openness (best practices on auditing government openness; the role of SAIs; information and communication policies; the interaction with the target audience) and SAI openness (developing websites and launching different products; raising and evaluating the effectiveness of SAIs activities; using metrics).

Pavel Demidov, Director of Communications Department, shared the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation experience.

Within the presentation, he introduced approaches used by the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation to create open environment; stressed the four rules of the communication strategy of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation regarding openness and accountability: defining your audience; developing your products and promoting them via relevant channels; communicating your best; evaluating your effectiveness. Pavel Demidov also noticed that during the 2020 pandemic year the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation published 235 communication products – basically one publication every working day.

“We have increased the number of followers in our social media, as well as the average coverage per post and the number of reactions. We know that we could reach more people, and people are better involved in the information we provide. People react better to what we write. But still, it’s about outputs. Do we make an impact system? How can we create communities in our social networks, which could help us in our audits or in implementing our audits, creating a kind of a league of followers – “civil controllers” and “civil auditors” who could assist in our work?”

emphasized Pavel Demidov.

Presentations were also made by:

• Françoise Guyot, Principal, Communications, Office of the Auditor General of Canada;
• Nigel Terrington, Director, Strategy, National Audit Office of the United Kingdom
• Hannah McNicholl, Director, Communications, National Audit Office of the United Kingdom

Timur Makhmutov, Director of the Department for International and Regional Cooperation, took the moderator role.