Public Accounts committee  Thank you. Yes, certainly we have similar audit technology. We use TeamMate in Australia as well for our financial statement work, and we have electronic record management systems, particularly for our performance auditors. They seem to be able to accumulate reams of information

Public Accounts committee  First, thank you for inviting us to be part of your inquiry. It was an honour to be asked by the OAG to lead the international review team, and I'm very comfortable with the report that Australia and its international colleagues have produced here. Having said that, the issues

Public Accounts committee  That's correct.

Public Accounts committee  Sorry, Sheila. Go ahead.

Public Accounts committee  I don't think it's significantly different. Let me just give you an outline of our mandate and what it entails. We do all of the financial statement audits of Commonwealth- or Australian government-controlled entities. All together there are about 243 entities. We in Australia do

Public Accounts committee  Certainly I wouldn't claim that we've got to the international best practice, but we do work hard, as I said earlier, at improving the audit quality. I'll ask Deb Jackson whether there are any specific matters in relation to special examinations that we may be able to draw on.

Public Accounts committee  To add to what Deb said, we've recently been implementing some software that allows our audit teams to interrogate our past audit reports and to draw out criteria, for instance, that may have been used in the past. As well, where we've articulated something around a subject matte

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much.

Public Accounts committee  No, we were just suggesting that the documentation could have been better put together to address the audit risks and, as Sheila Fraser mentioned earlier, the alignment between the risks and then the audit procedures put in place to assess whether those risks were significant and

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Vice-Chair. Yes, there certainly were. We actually make reference to some of these in the report, on page 17 of the English version. Certainly, we think the way your committee and your Auditor General work together is a very high-level model and we are most interest

Public Accounts committee  First, thank you for your kind comments about the review and the review team. Second, the countries we were involved with in undertaking the review are all members of the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions, and they are collectively moving to adopt internat

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much. I'll just make some opening comments and allow my colleagues to assist on the detail. Certainly, just to reinforce, the suggestions were areas where we felt that at the margin improvements could be made. It drew together the experience of the international t

Public Accounts committee  If I could add to Brandon's comments, when that system first came in in our office I was skeptical, as a good auditor, about whether it would be beneficial or not, but I decided to continue the approach. Actually, the effectiveness of it has been remarkable. A lot of the agency h

Public Accounts committee  I would just say a couple of things in this area. Auditors have always been expected to have what we call “professional scepticism”. That is, we do look for evidence and support for positions taken or for a set of financial statements to make sure that the figures do have integri

Public Accounts committee  I think this one had a much wider focus. It is much broader and more in depth, in the sense that particularly with our colleagues in New Zealand we may do a review of several of their performance audits, but we don't go into the full review of their quality management system for