Special Report Management of a Cross-Border Broadband Initiative: the Bytel Project

Report ID: 280

This report is the result of a co-ordinated examination between the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Northern Ireland Audit Office to the Bytel project. The project was aimed to provide high-speed broadband connectivity linking Belfast, Craigavon, Armagh, Dundalk and Dublin It was supported by the European Union (EU) Interreg III programme, which ran from 2000 to 2006.

Due to the nature of the issues to be examined and that Bytel was located in Northern Ireland, the detailed work in relation to the grant payments was carried out by the NIAO. The NIAO's report is also attached as an appendix of the report. The report examines the role of the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources in the management of the project.

Source: https://www.audit.gov.ie/en/Find-Report/Publications/Special%20Reports/Special-Report-90-Management-of-Cross-Border-Initiative-the-Bytel-Project.html

AFROSAI-E and IDI Cooperative Audit on Extractive Industries

Report ID: 253

Under the framework of the IDI/AFROSAI-E Cooperative Audit Project on Extractive Industries,  a series of parallel performance audits on the topic of National Content in the oil and gas sector took place between 2014 and 2015 with the participation of the SAIs of Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

The original purpose of the project was to help SAIs identify risk areas in the Extractive Industries area and help them formulate an audit approach that they could execute. The ultimate goal was that each SAI should complete an audit on a topic related to public sector management of the extractive industries sector. 

The SAIs  conducted a performance audit to examine, among others, the benefits in terms of increased local employment and use of local suppliers that result from the oil and gas industry. The SAIs drew a distinction between local and national, because in some countries the governments were concerned with benefit accruing to nationals, whereas others had specific aims of seeing benefits accruing to local communities affected by the oil and gas industry. 

The report outlines the methods applied by the project, the results achieved and the experiences for future projects of this type.

Coordinated Audit on Information Technologies Governance – Executive Summary

Report ID: 316

IT governance is the part of corporate governance that seeks to ensure that the use of IT adds value to the business with acceptable risk. To that end, IT governance seeks to avoid or mitigate deficiencies in the management of an institution, such as inadequate planning processes, the presence of IT projects without results and IT contracts that do not achieve their objectives, reflecting in loss of quality and efficiency.

The Coordinated Audit on IT Governance was carried out in the framework of the activities foreseen in strategic goal 3 (Knowledge Management) of OLACEFS' Strategic Plan 2011-2015. This audit was carried out with the participation of the SAIs of Bolivia, Brazil (Coordinator), Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Paraguay; and with financing from the IDB.

The objective of the audit was to assess the situation of information technology (IT) governance in the OLACEFS member countries, based on the audits carried out in representative institutions of various segments of the public administration of each participating country. The audit sought to obtain information that would allow the development of strategies to raise the level of maturity of IT governance and the dissemination of the knowledge and techniques used in the field work carried out.

As an audit criterion, in addition to the applicable legislation of each country, the controls provided for in the ISO/IEC 27002:2013 standard, a code of good practice for information security management; in the ISO/IEC 27005:2008 standard, which deals with information security risk management; in the ISO/IEC 38500:2008 standard and in the Cobit 5 of Isaca, which provide models of good practice for information technology governance, were adopted.

Source: https://www.olacefs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Executive-Summary-of-the-Coordinated-Audit-on-IT-Governance.pdf