National Audit Office successfully completes all Audits on Annual Financial Statements for 2019

This audit of public funds this year was quite challenging because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Balancing the need to protect the auditors’ health and enforcing the mandate by ensuring quality of our work created delays for some individual audit reports. Yet, despite the difficult working conditions, we are pleased to confirm that the National Audit Office has finalized the Annual Audit Report on 2019 Annual Financial Statements of the Budget of the Republic of Kosovo successfully closing the audit year.

Other than the Government’s financial performance, our reports provide additional information on other areas related to business of publicly owned enterprises, public funds spending performance (economic, effective and efficient use), and on procurement process implementation and financial reporting.

During the reporting year, we conducted the audit of 95 budget organisations with a general budget of around 2.5 billion, 14 publicly owned enterprises mainly in area of telecommunication, water supply and waste management, 13 performance audits and 9 donor-funded projects.

When closing the audit year, the Auditor General Besnik Osmani highlighted that we were mainly focused on the assessment of financial reporting quality, design and effectiveness of internal control systems, and the compliance of the financial transaction with the applicable legislation.

Through auditing we found that there is a slight progress as far as financial reporting is concerned, while there are still significant weaknesses and shortcomings in budget execution activities. We noticed that many capital projects start without sufficient funds and they are completed in time. On the other hand, the supervision fails to prevent frequent deviations from the terms stipulated in contracts.

On this occasion, it has been specifically requested from the Government to strengthen the financial discipline given that the amounts of outstanding liabilities and accounts receivable have been at high level, which absolutely remain the key challenge for the Government while asset recording and management is an issue that is repeated over years now and the progress in this area is poor.

We would hereby extend our acknowledgment to the audited entities for the cooperation under the pandemic circumstances and highly esteem the NAO staff for its commitment and professionalism in successfully accomplishing the work plan.

The National Audit Office shall start the new audit year on 15^th of September, and we are currently intensively engaged on the 2020/2021 annual work plan.