The President of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF), Cristina Herrero, today closed the 11th National Public Sector Auditing Conference, organised by the FIASEP Foundation, which focused, on this occasion, on the social benefit of public auditing. Cristina Herrero considered it essential to showcase the usefulness of auditing in order to be more effective in the task of guaranteeing proper management of public resources and ensuring transparency.
She emphasised that AIReF, despite not being an auditing body, shares a strong commitment to its mission. In fact, one of the primary goals she set herself when she assumed the role of President was to make AIReF a valuable institution for society as a whole, not just for the supervised General Government (GG) authorities but also for Parliament, the fiscal debate and the public.
To achieve this, AIReF, whose mission is to oversee the sustainability of public accounts from an ex-ante risk alert approach, tries to publicise its work and ensure it is understood. It also plays a significant role in communication to support supervision as the main tool of persuasion towards compliance and the reputational cost of not doing so.
For this reason, AIReF publicises the responses it receives from the GG authorities to its recommendations and proposals, and has developed two Monitors to oversee this dialogue with these GG authorities: one on the recommendations included in the reports and another on the findings and proposals of its evaluations.
The President also highlighted that AIReF is pursuing a communication policy aimed at society as a whole, based on maximum transparency, balancing rigour and dissemination, with content that helps to understand the subject matter, such as informative videos and infographics, and through a greater presence on social media and forums of different kinds.
However, she acknowledged that AIReF will face numerous challenges in the future. She stressed that AIReF will be more vigilant in monitoring the commitments made by the GG authorities when they pledge to comply with AIReF’s recommendations. It will also intensify the monitoring of the proposals it makes to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of public policies. Furthermore, it will increase its efforts to engage with the public without compromising on rigour.
