Magazine No. 26 - 2021 111 Studies and other articles The General Secretariat of ARABOSAI ARABOSAI’S RESPONSE TO COVID-19 CRISIS The COVID-19 epidemic has represented an unprecedented challenge for all countries of the world in terms of the breadth and depth of its impacts, which touched all health, economic, social and development aspects. This pandemic has imposed new restrictions on all actors leading to a necessity to think quickly about adopting practical solutions in order to ensure a minimum level of continuity of activity, especially given the lack of clarity about a specific date for overcoming this crisis. In this context, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic raised a number of questions about how to ensure that the Supreme Audit Institutions continue to carry out their original tasks and legal mandates, which is mainly auditing the proper spending of public funds, and that requires the adoption of a certain degree of flexibility in carrying out their activities without neglecting quality and independence requirements. The Arab Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (ARABOSAI) has worked since the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis at the beginning of the year 2020 to adopt a number of initiatives with the aim of supporting the work of the Arab Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs), in order to achieve a number of specific objectives that included ensuring the continuity of the audit work in a reasonable format and exchanging best practices and experiences regarding the implementation of different types of audit (financial, compliance, performance audit) in the context of the new constraints that resulted from the health crisis. After its extraordinary meeting held remotely on April 20, 2020, the Governing Board of ARABOSAI approved an exceptional plan proposed by the General Secretariat of the organization, which included topics related to the communication plan and technical accompaniment of the Arab SAIs to confront the repercussions of the crisis on their working procedures and measures to protect their auditors, and organizing seminars and webinars in coordination with member SAIs and the organization's committees and stakeholders, and organizing remote lectures regarding the consideration of audit practical aspects regarding the Covid 19 pandemic challenges. 1. Adoption of an updated communication plan One of the most prominent challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic is how to take the best from technical and logistical solutions for remote work and ensure their effectiveness in order to meet the specific needs of audit work. In this context, ARABOSAI set a number of goals, including developing an exceptional communication plan, whether with regard to its continuous outputs of publications or reports, or with regard to the outputs related to INTOSAI or its affiliated structures, at the level of its official page on Facebook or on its website. ARABOSAI has made many achievements in this field, as the "COVID-19" section has been created on the organization's website in both Arabic and English. This section is used to collect materials related to combatting the repercussions of the pandemic, such as the collection of evidence, definition and determination of audit standards, articles, webinars records and sharing experiences of similar SAIs... This pandemic has imposed new restrictions on all actors ARABOSAI set a number of goals, including developing an exceptional communication plan
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