A body of public auditors, under the aegis of Federal and States Auditors-General Association (FSAGA) has urged audit practioners in Nigeria to uphold the core standards of auditing practices in the discharge of their professional duties.
Dr Samuel Udu, the head of sub-supreme audit institution (SAI) and the Auditor-General of Ebonyi stated this in an interview with the newsmen on Monday in Abakaliki after the opening session of a four-day training for public auditors in South-East zone by the body.
He regretted that before now that auditing reporting process across the public sectors in Nigeria did not comply nor conform with the international best standards.
Udu said that the objective of the training was to build capacity of public auditors on the current auditing practices and make them function in line with national and international audit standards.
“As professional public auditors, we agreed that there is a very big gap; most auditors-general and their staff, they don’t know a lot of the current happenings in the public sector auditing profession.
“So, the body decided to train the federal and states auditors-general offices at zonal levels and Ebonyi took the first shot for the South-East.
“We want to have a common reporting standards; what my audit report will say in the state will be what the Local Government auditor-general report in the state will say and should be the same thing with that of Jigsaw, Plateau , Kaduna and everywhere in Nigeria and internationally.
“What we are doing is that we want to streamline it, not this person will be writing a different thing and the other person will be writing a different thing.
“Most of the reports we have gotten were not International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institution (ITOSAI) standard, so, we want to streamline the practice,” Udu said.
Udu noted that with the exception of Ebonyi that all the states in the South-East zone were backwards in the auditing process adding that Ebonyi participated actively in States Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability (SFTAS), a World Bank initiated project.
“In 2020 Ebonyi came fourth, in 2021 and 2022 when SFTAS wound up , Ebonyi came first in the two years and we are also lucky that we benefitted from USAID State2State, and beneficiaries were six states from the federation out of which two were from the South.
” Ebonyi is one and Akwa Ibom two while the other states were from the North and these achievements are some of the things that have made Ebonyi to fame up and measure up with international auditing standards,” he said. ENDS/)
