EUROSAI. Magazine N22 - 2016

Magazine No. 22 - 2016 7 EDITORIAL European Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions Ramón Álvarez de Miranda García President of the Spanish Court of Audit Secretary General of EUROSAI Dear colleagues, In April 1991, only a few months after the creation of EUROSAI, the first issue of its magazine was published and since then the Magazine has unceasingly acted as a communication platform for the EUROSAI community, offering its members a unique forum in which to share our achievements and mutual concerns. As part of a constant endeavor to ensure that the publication meets the members’ expectations, during this year a survey was carried out in order to collect the readers’ views on the magazine and gather proposals on its improvement and further developments. I would like to express my gratitude for all the valuable feedback received in this process; the survey not only revealed a high level of satisfaction with the magazine, but it also provided several useful suggestions for its improvement and promotion, some of which have already been implemented in this edition. This year’s issue of the EUROSAI Magazine has as central theme The Agenda 2030: Opportunities and Challenges for SAIs, with the aim of further increasing awareness within our community on this matter and support INTOSAI’s initiatives in this field. Our members are facing the challenge of defining the role they can play in order to contribute to the global implementation and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and, in this regard, the sharing of SAIs’ experiences through the EUROSAI Magazine can no doubt offer a valuable source of information and inspiration. As you all know, we are approaching the final months of the implementation of our first Strategic Plan. The plan launched six years ago has brought along a significant transformation of our Organization, not only in the way it operates but also in the amount of initiatives and projects launched. This has undoubtedly been a thriving and fruitful period, marked by an intensified knowledge sharing and the birth of new joint initiatives, thus intensifying EUROSAI’s added value for the members. The fruits of this collective effort are numerous and varied, among which we can mention the dissemination of innovation initiatives, the databases of products and audits, and broad-ranging audit cooperation comprising new fields such as ethics or municipality audit. However, EUROSAI should not settle for this positive result, as that would entail the risk of losing the momentum. On the contrary, EUROSAI must strive to improve its performance and meet members’ expectations to an even higher degree, and, since all of us make up EUROSAI, we must do this together, in a joint and shared effort. The new Strategic Plan, to be approved at the next Congress in May 2017, will give us the guidelines to do so, but it will be up to each and every one of us to transform that new strategy into a tangible reality, for the benefit of the entire EUROSAI community. I look forward to joining you in this challenge during the coming years and, once again, I thank those who have made it possible to bring out this new issue of the EUROSAI Magazine with their valuable contributions.