In the face of a team of international auditors, GAO stands strong

Every public institution needs an outside, independent look from time to time to make sure it’s meeting its mission with integrity. But if you’re they biggest and most trusted government auditing organization in the country, who audits you? It turns out it is teams from other countries. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) just underwent a peer review by a team made up of auditors from Sweden, Norway, Canada and New Zealand. GAO “passed” – which is actually the highest score you can get. Ben Nelson is GAO’s managing director for quality and continuous improvement. He joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to talk about what GAO learned from that latest round of outside scrutiny.

Interview Transcript: 

Ben Nelson A great question to start with. So first of all, the purpose of a peer review is to have an independent assessment of an audit organization’s system of quality control. So that’s the primary objective. And the peer review has to answer two questions. Is the organization’s system of quality assurance suitably designed to ensure compliance with all relevant standards? And secondly, is there material compliance with those requirements. To do so, the peer review team conducts multiple assessments. They interview staff, leadership management. They review documents and they perform compliance tests of a sample of GAO’s work.

Jared Serbu And let’s talk about the standards a bit. I think I’ve always had in my head that generally accepted government accounting standards are U.S. standards, but it sounds like these are actually international standards that a lot of supreme audit organizations, as they’re called, I think, also follow.

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Ben Nelson Yes. In the case of GAO, the peer review is conducted in accordance with U.S. government auditing standards, and that’s part of the agreement that is reached that we will be assessed on GAGA’s or Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standard. Now, many countries have the equivalent of GAO, and they have the skills and competence to review GAO. They are familiar with government. They’re familiar with the challenges associated with auditing and government, as well as the context in which GAO operates. So we find that these foreign counterparts to be well suited to conduct the independent assessment of GAO. And I want to emphasize that independence is absolutely critical and peer review and under the standards we are looking for, to put together a team that can conduct this independent assessment and a team that isn’t a part of any organization under GAO’s purview.

Jared Serbu Got it. So if the roles were reversed and GAO was involved in a team that was assessing another country’s audit organization, you would do it against their standards. Is that about right?

Ben Nelson Yeah. The review is done against the reviewed country standards. Yes, hat’s right, Jared.

Jared Serbu So these have been going on for a number of years, take us through maybe some examples of things that GAO has learned through these reviews and ways that it’s made you better.

Ben Nelson Well, Jared, I want to say first, the primary benefit of peer review is to establish confidence. Confidence in GAOs work, confidence that Congress and the American people can have confidence in GAOs work, confidence in GAOs findings, conclusions and recommendations, and confidence that GAO operates with independence and integrity, which was identified by the peer review team as contributing to GAO’s effectiveness that we have this culture of independence, integrity and accountability at the next level. What we’ve learned from the peer reviews is that there are opportunities to enhance our practice to make it even more effective. One of the lessons that we learned from a prior peer review is that you need to consider producing multiple products, multiple product types from a GAO audit because we need to serve various audiences and meet varying needs, information needs. So as a result, GAO has brought its product types. We’ve expanded to move beyond our traditional reports to issue several types of short form products that are timely and that meet a specific need.

Jared Serbu And how about from this most recent review? What are what are the main takeaways from you and the main things that the GAO thinks it needs to work on improving in future years based on this?

Ben Nelson Well, let me say GAO received a great scorecard from this particular peer review. We received a grade a pass, which is the highest possible score that you can get. This peer review team also closed out seven prior peer review suggestions. They identified six practices that contribute to GAO’s effectiveness. By the way, they also suggested that these practices should be considered by other national audit organizations. And Jared you’re correct, they did make three suggestions. One of those suggestions was for GAO to enhance the amount of information provided to congressional requesters regarding timeframes for starting the work. This is a suggestion that we have already started to take action on. There were other suggestions that we will consider as we move forward.

Jared Serbu I want to finish up by just looping back around to the multiple information delivery pathways that you talked about before. What is that starting to look like? I mean, everybody thinks about GAO as providing information to the public and to the Congress and in traditional written reports. What are some of the other ways that you’ve expanded that delivery?

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Ben Nelson Yes, of course, Jared, the standard format reports are still our primary vehicle for communicating the results of our work. But what we’ve found is that for some topics, topics that in which GAO has done quite a bit of work, or emerging issues such as artificial intelligence or work related to the pandemic, that short form products that we refer to as snapshots can help the Congress in terms of understanding the dimensions of a particular issue or an emerging issue. And we can issue those in a very timely fashion, because GAO has conducted a body of work. We’ve created institutional knowledge that we can quickly share to help Congress address some of these emerging issues or challenging issues.

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