EUROSAI. Magazine N21 - 2015

EUROPEAN ORGANISATION OF SUPREME AUDIT INSTITUTIONS REPORTS AND STUDIES 79 www.eurosai.org · N.º 21 - 2015 25 years ago and following the commitment contained in the Berlin Declaration, thirty European SAIs gathered in Madrid, full of energy and great expectations, with the aim of creating the European Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (EUROSAI) as a Forum for all the SAIs in the European states from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains and from the Mediterranean to the North Cape. The EUROSAI Statutes were adopted by all the members during the EUROSAI first Congress and at that time the Spanish Court of Audit (SCA) officially took a step forward to assume the responsibility of setting up and ensuring the functioning of the Organisation’s Secretariat, thus its President becoming the Secretary General of EUROSAI. That commitment with EUROSAI was the logical outcome of the solid involvement of the Spanish Court of Audit in the EUROSAI initiative since the very beginning, when the first talks about this idea took place, back in the sixties. In this regard, at the V INCOSAI (1965) representatives of the Spanish and French SAIs proposed a meeting of European SAIs to discuss the creation of such an Organisation. Some years later, at the VIII INCOSAI (1974) hosted by the SCA, the decision to study this initiative in detail was made, following which the SCA, together with the colleagues from the Corte dei Conti, worked on the drafting of the first version of the Statues. The involvement of the SCA didn’t waver during the succesive years, during which it not only embarked, together with the Italian colleagues, on the task of approaching other European SAIs with this initiative, but was also one of the signatories of the Berlin Declaration (1989) and formed part of the Committee entrusted with finalizing the draft of the Statues, while at the same time having taken on the role of a temporary Secretariat. All these efforts resulted THE SPANISH COURT OF AUDIT, 25 YEARS AT THE FOREFRONT OF THE EUROSAI SECRETARIAT; REFLECTIONS AND A LOOK INTO THE FUTURE Ramón Álvarez de Miranda García President of the Spanish Court of Audit Secretary General of EUROSAI Headquarters of the Spanish Court of Audit