Alexey Kudrin, Chairman of the Accounts Chamber, met with Dr. Duško Pejović, President and Auditor General of the State Audit Institution of Serbia (SAIS).

Preparations for the International Congress of Supreme Audit Institutions (INCOSAI) XXIII to convene in September 2019 in Moscow were the main topic of their meeting. “In less than a month, we will host the INCOSAI XXIII in Moscow. It’s a great honor and a milestone event for us and the competencies to manage this large-scale audit organization will be thereby vested in the Accounts Chamber of Russia for the period of three years. And preparations to the Congress are of course a key line of our action at the moment. We are geared to generate new ideas and want that supreme audit institutions pay more attention to new challenges of the times in their deliberations,” the Chairman of the Russian SAI said at the meeting.

Alexey Kudrin also mentioned that SAIS was an active contributor to the INCOSAI proceedings. “We are very pleased to hear that the Serbian delegation will join us to discuss each of the open debate topics. Your undivided attention once again proves that we have made a good choice in setting the talking modalities and picking the topics to be discussed within the circles of professional auditors,” he said.

The parties exchanged their views on the role of SAIs in the modern-day world and shared some recent state audit practices and approaches in light of the upcoming INCOSAI agenda.
Alexey Kudrin told his counterpart about the transformations the Russian SAI is currently experiencing and said that: “Today the Accounts Chamber sees itself primarily as a strategic partner and an ‘external consultant’ to the authorities in line with the new Development Strategy we adopted in August last year. We are gradually moving away from the traditional role of the ‘critic’ and trying to take a proactive approach by providing the Government with guidance on how to address systemic weaknesses in addition to our audit reports. In this regard, we would be particularly interested in hearing about your experience in the development of a framework for the fulfillment of recommendations SAI makes. We look forward to discussing this matter in detail during our scheduled best practice seminar.”

As a result, the parties agreed to continue to share knowledge on any important issue of external public audit and renew their cooperation agreement so that it could cover all developments currently happening in public audit.