Other Financial Accountability Study

149 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2186

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Supreme Audit Institutions Independence Index: 2021 Global Synthesis Report

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-20) World Bank

This report aims to inform and better equip World Bank task teams and development partners to support the strengthening of Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) in client countries. It also aims to help focus the ongoing collaboration between the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institution (INTOSAI) and development agencies to address the intractable SAI independence issue. The report also responds to yearnings of several development partners to better understand the degree of SAI independence in countries and regions.
The Next Wave of Suptech Innovation: Suptech Solutions for Market Conduct Supervision

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03-01) World Bank

Around the world, financial sector supervisors are experiencing a profound shift to data-driven supervision enabled by the next wave of technology and data solutions. While technology and data are not new to financial oversight, their specific application to financial consumer protection and market conduct supervision has become more widespread and sophisticated in recent years. Expanding on the World Bank’s 2018 note on supervisory technology, or suptech, this technical note catalogues a range of specific solutions that financial authorities are deploying to help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of market conduct supervision. The note identifies four categories of suptech solutions (regulatory reporting, collection and processing of complaints data, non-traditional market monitoring, document and business analysis) and provides concrete examples of 18 different suptech solutions for market conduct supervision, drawing from the experiences of 14 financial sector authorities worldwide. The note also discusses implementation considerations and enablers of successful suptech adoption commonly experienced across countries.
Anticorruption Initiatives: Reaffirming Commitment to a Development Priority

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12-20) World Bank Group

Corruption continues to have a disproportionate impact on the poor and most vulnerable, increasing the cost of, and reducing access to, health, education, justice, electricity and other basic services, thereby exacerbating inequality. It reduces private investment as it increases risks for investors, with consequent effects on growth and jobs. It distorts public spending decisions and weakens the quality of public investments as substandard infrastructure gets built and the regulatory systems for quality control and safety are bypassed. It erodes public trust in governments, undermining their legitimacy and posing a threat to peace and stability. This paper draws on these lessons and proposes a new approach, both in terms of what we work on and how we work, focusing on initiatives to be led by the Bank’s EFI vice presidency to reaffirm the Bank’s commitment to anticorruption. The initiatives refresh approaches that are showing results, scale up those that are emerging and show promise, or experiment and innovate where fresh thinking is needed in our support to client countries to help them control corruption. In this note, corruption is seen as both a symptom of underlying governance challenges and a problem in and of itself. For practical purposes, and to keep the focus on corruption, the initiatives do not expound on the many aspects of governance that influence corruption. The paper also does not focus on efforts to control corruption risk in World Bank operations, but rather focus on the support that the EFI Vice Presidency will provide to countries in their efforts to control corruption.
Strengthening Oversight: Improving the Quality of Statutory Audits in the Philippines

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05) World Bank Group

Since 2003, the Philippines have been striving to implement reforms aimed at improving audit quality. Oversight of the audit profession is a key control over the financial reporting architecture of a country’s private sector. A Quality Assurance Review system over audit practitioners is a subset of oversight which serves as a key monitoring control over the integrity of financial reporting. In keeping with the country’s strategic priority of boosting private sector development by improving the investment climate for firms of all sizes, including greater access to finance, legislation was enacted to support the objective of increasing the integrity of private sector financial reporting through improved audit quality. Accordingly, the Board of Accountancy was mandated with the power to conduct oversight into the quality of audits of financial statements through a review of the quality control measures instituted by auditors in order to ensure compliance with the accounting and auditing standards and practices. . However, the injunction remains in place and, accordingly, implementation of the mandated Quality Assurance Review Program may not move forward. Several concrete steps should be taken in order to effectively move forward with the rollout of a comprehensive system of public oversight including audit quality assurance in the Philippines. These include (1) reforming the legal framework to establish an effective audit oversight system with sufficient legal power and authority (2) rationalizing the statutory audit threshold to minimize the conditions contributing to low quality audits, (3) building support among key stakeholder groups by properly addressing their concerns to the extent possible, (4) ensuring coordination of efforts among regulators to eliminate gaps and overlaps and foster collaboration among the group, and (5) establishing a dedicated Project Management Office to oversee the rollout of a Quality Assurance Review Program over audit practitioners.
Croatia’s EU Accession: Case Studies on Reform and the Transposition of the Community Acquis

(World Bank, Vienna, 2016) World Bank Group

Croatia, a founding member of the former Republic of Yugoslavia and a current member of the European Union (EU), is a high-income country in Europe and Central Asia. Given that high quality financial reporting promotes good corporate governance, reduces uncertainty and risk, can help to lower the cost of capital, and boosts investor confidence, it will play a critical role in the country’s strategy to champion private sector led growth for economic development. Croatia’s preparation to join the EU required reform of its corporate financial reporting framework and practices, among other things, and laid the foundation for enhanced financial reporting and increased transparency. Although the country’s accession to the EU on July 1, 2013 was a single historical point in time, it encapsulated years of transformation of the statutory and institutional framework in every aspect of the economic, social, and political spheres of the country. The purpose of this report, which focuses on Croatia’s adoption and implementation of the corporate financial reporting aspects of the acquis’, company law, is to enhance understanding of how successful transitions work in practice, that is, what makes some reforms succeed where others fail. It attempts to answer questions such as: what happens when countries adopt international standards; what issues arise when one tries to merge differing legal traditions; how to achieve reform when there are capacity constraints and key implementing institutions are missing; what are the different strategies that can be used during various phases of a reform process; and, more generally, what factors encourage failure or lead to success?
Strengthening Financial Reporting Regimes and the Accountancy Profession and Practices in Selected Caribbean Countries

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06-26) World Bank Group

The main objectives of this report are to: (a) provide a synthesized analysis of financial reporting and auditing standards and practices across the countries in which the Institute of Chartered Accountants of the Caribbean (ICAC) is active and (b) provide a basis for recommendations to ICAC and respective national institutes for a regional strategy to enhance the accounting profession and the accounting and auditing practices in the public and private sectors. This report’s focus on reforms and identification of areas and means to strengthen the accounting profession have at their root the conviction that systemic enhancements to the standards and practices of the profession can materially improve the lives of the region’s populace, particularly its less prosperous citizens, through greater transparency, strengthened economic growth and its attendant employment and tax revenue prospects, and greater access to financing for and formalization of the region’s dominant sector-micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). The report finds that a constraint limiting both investment across the region, particularly to MSMEs that characterize the respective national economies, and the efficient use of public resources is the accounting and auditing practices and the financial reporting regimes that prevail in both the public and private sectors. This finding emerges from: (i) a review of Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes for Accounting and Auditing (ROSC AA) conducted by the World Bank for Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and the countries of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, and (ii) Bank missions to those countries updating the ROSC findings as well as missions to countries that have not yet had ROSC AA reviews (during which the Bank team met the national accountancy body, regulators of entities that fall within the financial reporting chain, supreme audit institutions, central banks, and so forth so as to secure information that would typically be found in formal ROSC AA reports).
Republic of Paraguay : Strengthening Tax Administration and SOE Corporate Governance

(Washington, DC, 2014-08-05) World Bank

This document describes the activities carried out and results achieved under the strengthening tax administration and state-owned enterprises (SOE) corporate governance non - lending technical assistance (NLTA). The objectives of this NLTA are: (i) to contribute to protect sources of value added tax (VAT) revenue through enhanced control and management of tax refund claims and cross cutting strategic management support, and (ii) to contribute to improve corporate governance of SOEs for more efficient and transparent public enterprises. Activities under the NLTA were carried out primarily in FY2014. The document is divided into three parts: (i) introduction, (ii) components, activities, and results, and (iii) lessons learned.
Philippines - Discussion Notes : Challenges and Options for 2010 and Beyond

(World Bank, 2011-06-09) World Bank

With the global economy on the way to recovery from the financial crisis, the Asian economies appear poised to bounce back strongly. For most people in the Philippines, however, a return to the status quo ante will offer little consolation. That is because when economic growth accelerated during 2002-08, poverty did not decline as hoped. With a third of the population currently below the poverty line, and high and rising inequality in incomes, the country's main development challenge is to achieve growth that is much more widely shared to make growth work for the poor. Making growth work for the poor in the Philippines is a significant development challenge, but one that is worth pursuing vigorously. The new administration not only has the mandate but the historic opportunity to deliver on this goal as well as other election platforms on which it was voted to power. These include 'the organized and widely-shared rapid expansion of the economy through a government dedicated to honing and mobilizing the people's skills and energies as well as the responsible harnessing of natural resources; moving to well-considered programs that build capacity and create opportunity among the poor and the marginalized in the country; policies that create conditions conducive to the growth and competitiveness of private businesses, big, medium and small; and making education the central strategy for investing in people, reducing poverty and building national competitiveness.' In addition, the new administration is committed to fight corruption. These goals are fully echoed in the strategy and policy actions identified above and elaborated in the accompanying discussion notes.
Ukraine : System of Financial Oversight and Governance of State-Owned Enterprises

(Washington, DC, 2011-02-22) World Bank

The report focuses on the system of financial oversight and governance of state-owned enterprises in Ukraine. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) continue to represent a significant share of Ukraine's economy, and play a dominant role in sectors such as rail, transport, utilities, energy and telecommunications. These enterprises play an important role for the government by remitting dividend payments to the national treasury to fund the country's development agenda. At the same time, these same enterprises government receive fiscal support through a transfer of budgetary resources, issuance of guarantees for enterprise debt, facilitation to lines of credit, and other financial instruments. Ukraine's SOE sector has a wide range of ownership and management schemes. The basic legal framework for SOE oversight, defined in the Commercial Code of Ukraine, provides for the delegation of responsibilities across several ministries/agencies. As a result, there are overlapping roles across different government institutions, and gaps with regard to active monitoring and oversight. In practice, the SOE oversight function of the line ministries is primarily exercised through a review of the reports submitted by the SOEs on the implementation of financial plans. However, the review is typically light, and its efficiency is undermined by the limited clarity of the operating objectives for SOEs, and limited usefulness of the performance management framework. Moreover, the underlying data used to measure performance indicators is not validated and its reliability is uncertain. Even though the current performance management framework can be improved, performance evaluations are not conducted for a substantial number of SOEs which seriously undermines the effectiveness of oversight.
Guidance for Supervisory Board Members of Banks

(International Finance Corporation, Washington, DC, 2006-09) International Finance Corporation

This manual, for present and prospective Supervisory Board (SB) members of non-complex banks, is intended to provide a guide to international best practice. It is designed to help SB in a practical way attend and maintain high standard of internal governance. This manual provides an overview. SB members are advised to familiarize themselves with the scope of the relevant legislation as they may be personally liable for breaches of certain provisions. This manual gives SB members fundamental understanding of their tasks. For more publications on IFC Sustainability please visit www.ifc.org/sustainabilitypublications.