The 2020 Stocktake confirms that SAIs are progressing towards increased adoption of the International Standards for Supreme Audit Institutions (ISSAIs), with 86% of SAIs reporting that they have adopted ISSAI standards in some form. Despite that, there is still a long way to go to achieve implementation of ISSAIs, and SAI PMF data suggests that few SAIs are mostly complying with ISSAIs across all parts of the audit process. Across financial, performance and compliance audits, a substantially larger proportion of SAIs have ISSAI compliant manuals than have ISSAI compliant audit practices. More SAIs are also meeting ISSAI benchmarks for planning, conducting and reporting in financial audit and performance audit while compliance audit is lagging behind.

There's also a worrisome trend observed for audit coverage. Since 2014, coverage has receded slightly for financial and performance audit, while it has increased slightly for compliance audit. As more efforts are required to implement compliance audit according to the ISSAIs, part of the decrease in coverage could be due to a shift in priorities towards compliance audit.

According to the Global Survey, the most common reason for not implementing the ISSAIs is a lack of resources. This also seems to affect key parts of the audit process including quality management, coverage, reporting and follow-up. For quality management, 37% of SAIs report the lack of a monitoring system for audit quality for any of the main audit streams, a figure which is even higher for SAIs with perceived insufficient resources.

After a fall to 58% in the 2017 report, the proportion of SAIs that publish at least 80% of their audit reports has been reinstated at 70%.

The trend of increased publication is reflected in all regions (though 12% report that they have not published any reports).

While positive, it should be noted that there is a correlation between sufficient resources and democracy levels, and SAIs' ability to publish audits reports. Almost all SAIs who didn't publish reports are from countries from the lower end of the democracy index.

Finally, there's also a substantial reduction in the proportion of SAIs who report that they have an internal audit follow-up system across audit types, from 86% in 2017 to 65% in 2020.

Again, the existence of follow-up systems is more prevalent for SAIs in High Income (HI) countries, and amongst SAIs who have access to sufficient resources. Furthermore, reported implementation of audit recommendations is higher for jurisdictional control, than for compliance, performance and financial audit, suggesting the need to enhance follow-up mechanisms for these audit streams.

The most frequently reported impediment to implementation of audit recommendations is the executive response. While SAIs report regular communication with the Executive, they involve the Executive less in the follow-up of audits by failing to request feedback on the status of the audit recommendations or evidence that recommendations have been implemented.

This suggests a need to improve relations with the Executive Branch, and/or to cooperate with other oversight institutions and civil society actors to strengthen implementation of audit recommendations. However, as legislative and judicial oversight functions are also perceived as major obstacles to achieving impact, SAIs should enhance their cooperation with them as well.

Systems for quality management and audit processes maintain and promote timely and high quality audits, facilitate internal learning and can provide assurance that the SAIs are carrying out their work in line with the ISSAIs. Organisational challenges in developing and maintaining these systems heighten the risk to overall accountability, as corroborated by scores on aggregated indicators for audit work and oversight reported by the PEFA framework and the Open Budget Survey.