Other Financial Accountability Study

149 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

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

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 11

Supreme Audit Institutions’ Use of Information Technology Globally for More Efficient and Effective Audits

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10-18) World Bank

Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) recognize the benefits of using technology to improve the quality and impact of their audits. This benefit has further intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic; SAIs with existing technology capacity have continued to perform their role effectively and efficiently. The paper explores how at a global level SAIs are using technology to perform more efficient and more effective audits. It provides a brief overview of how some SAIs are harnessing the possibilities created by advances in technology to develop new, innovative audit methods and procedures. It also seeks to identify the factors inhibiting other SAIs in particular SAIs in developing countries from implementing and using audit methods based on information technology (IT). Against this background, the paper suggests ways in which the World Bank, working with other stakeholders, can facilitate the more extensive and more effective use of IT-based tools and methods by SAIs. The impact of COVID-19 has introduced a new important consideration: namely, how IT has helped some SAIs respond with agility and resilience to the unprecedented and completely unforeseen circumstances created by the pandemic.
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.
Building Effective, Accountable, and Inclusive Institutions in Europe and Central Asia: Lessons from the Region

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Arizti, Pedro ; Boyce, Daniel J. ; Manuilova, Natalia ; Sabatino, Carlos ; Senderowitsch, Roby ; Vila, Ermal

Countries around the world are facing the need to build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions. There has never been a more important moment to tackle this agenda, as countries grapple with increasing fragility and migration flows, more complex service delivery requirements, and greater demands for transparency and inclusion, all in a more resource-constrained environment. Moreover, the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic crisis has provided new evidence of the need for effective, accountable, and inclusive government responses. Governments’ capacity to respond to these complex challenges is understandably stretched, but this has not limited the rise of citizens’ expectations. Instead, it has often increased tensions and, in some cases, has affected the trust between governments and their citizens. This publication builds on the World Bank’s vast engagement across ECA and on the 2019 regional governance conference. It consists of six chapters, each corresponding to one of the governance areas around which governments across the world organize their institutional functions. Each chapter contains background and analysis by World Bank specialists, complemented by country case studies authored by regional experts and policymakers.
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.
Regional Study on the Management, Control, and Recording of Fixed Assets: Latin America and the Caribbean

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-10) Gourfinkel, Dmitri

This report represents a series of studies on the status of the implementation of the International Public Sector Accounting Standards in the Latin America region. The first report of this series, Public Sector Accounting and Financial Information in Latin America, was developed by the World Bank team and issued in April 2015. The general purpose of this second report is to document the status of the management, control, and recording of fixed assets in the countries surveyed, and to propose a comprehensive asset management model to strengthen the region’s public financial management systems in terms of public sector accounting, public investment, transparency, and accountability. The report aims to address the following asset management challenges: (a) accounting methodologies that have been adopted or implemented in the surveyed countries do not necessarily capture all government fixed assets; (b) incomplete or unreliable information on infrastructure assets and projects and other fixed assets, as well as on the provisions related to their upkeep and replacement, creates obstacles to improving public investment policies and enhancing the region’s ability to promote productivity and competitiveness; (c) greater control of fixed assets is directly related to the improvement of transparency and accountability indexes; and (d) governments’ inability to obtain an objective picture of their financial position and performance limits the quality of analysis on the efficient use of public resources related to electoral commitments, fiscal stability, and economic growth in the medium and long term.
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).
Rwanda : Fiduciary Assessment on a Proposed Credit

(Washington, DC, 2014-09-14) World Bank

A fiduciary assessment for the Rwanda Public Sector Governance PforR was carried out, taking into account recent PFM diagnostic reports and meetings and discussions with key officials in the proposed implementing agencies and other stakeholders. The assessment followed the Draft Guidance Notes on PforR Operations and requirements of OP/BP 9.00, Program for Results. The assessment used the four pillars approach of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) to define the inherent risks in the procurement environment. In line with the Sector Board s practices manual, the potential FM risks for the various PFM elements are rated as low (L), modest (M), substantial (S), or high (H). The assessment is also mindful of the gaps that may exist between form (policies, laws, structures, instructions/manuals) and actual functionality or practices of the PFM system. Mitigation measures are proposed to reinforce the government s PFM reform efforts. Critical measures are included in the PAP.
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.