Public participation in external oversight: Demystifying false dilemmas

04 November 2020

Citizen participation in external oversight has gained renewed salience in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The resort to extraordinary powers and financial resources to face the health crisis and its economic impact highlights the importance of accountability and transparency to strengthen trust in public institutions.

The international seminar “Citizen Participation and External Auditing” (in Spanish) addressed two important issues for Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs), namely the impact of citizen participation in external audits on SAI independence and on the technical nature of audits.

Some SAI staff argue that participation—including civil society participation—could negatively impact SAIs’ independence by biasing the audit work towards particular interests. Further, the prominently technical character of SAIs’ work is frequently underscored, and citizens’ lack of this kind of knowhow is pointed out. While SAI independence and the technical nature of auditing are important, these arguments give raise to false dichotomies between “external oversight” and “participation.”

SAIs’ independence is not incompatible with participation. Independence needs to be understood as a guarantee that the public entities subject to oversight will not interfere with the performance of SAIs’ functions. That aim does not conflict with SAIs’ responsiveness to the needs and demands of the citizens.

An overview of citizen participation experiences among Latin American SAIs does not provide any evidence to support the concerns about citizen participation. Experiences like that of Argentina’s General Audit Office or Colombia’s General Comptroller of the Republic, which have had participation mechanisms in place since early in the century, show no negative effects of participation on their independence.

Conversely, the interaction with citizens can help buttress SAIs’ independence when facing potential political interference. In fact, one of the main potential sources of interference with SAI independence in some countries of Latin America relates to a process of selection of their top executives that does not favour the suitability and independence of candidates, but instead privileges the distribution of offices among political parties. In contrast, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, the involvement of the Social Participation Committee of the state anti-corruption system in the designation of the auditor general led to a more legitimate selection process.

Independence should not be confused with isolation. Nowadays, in resonance with Sustainable Development Goal 16, effective oversight institutions cannot be conceived in isolation from society.

This conclusion requires a revision of the model of horizontal accountability. The model has drawbacks when applied without considering the interaction between SAIs and other institutions, or between them and the rest of society. As stressed by Jonathan Fox at the seminar, “Accountability should be conceived as a chain of actors that reinforce one another, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, considering that the chain is as strong as its weakest link.” Accountability requires independent and effective SAIs working together with other (independent and effective) actors of the oversight system, including the public.

Regarding the second prejudice against social participation—the lack of citizens’ capacity to participate due to the technical nature of external oversight--, the aim is not to replace roles and expertise but to complement them. Oversight is complemented and enhanced by public contributions involving a broad range of actors. Social audits are no substitute for external auditing and its technical capacity, but they provide valuable information and bring up the perspective of society.

Many examples show the value of citizen contributions to public oversight. A joint audit between the citizen oversight body (veeduría ciudadana) and the Colombian SAI to audit the public resources deployed for the reconstruction of households damaged by the destruction of the urban center of the Gramalote municipality in 2017 produced 10 administrative findings that had disciplinary implications as well as fiscal impact. In Costa Rica, a 2018 audit on the quality of drinking water services in vulnerable communities involved the local indigenous communities in the prioritization and validation of indicators. In 2003, the participation of persons with disabilities in an audit of the Auditor General of Argentina on the accessibility of public transportation made it possible to identity the failure of transit buses to comply with the use of ramps for people with disabilities during rush hour.

Technical expertise is not a requirement for contributing to government oversight. In Perú, citizen oversight monitors (“monitores ciudadanos de control”) are volunteers, trained and duly accredited by the SAI, who conduct social oversight of public works or of the delivery of goods and services financed with public resources. In 2019, 2,187 monitors in 24 Peruvian regions made 2,234 visits to 1,275 worksites. They generated 1,714 citizen reports indicating lack of compliance. These reports resulted in oversight measures by the SAI, and in penalties for 1,036,426 soles. This program has now been adapted to virtual oversight over the use of public resources in delivering baskets of basic goods to vulnerable populations in response to the pandemic.

As emphasized by Nelson Shack, Peru’s General Comptroller and president of OLACEFS, “There is much capacity in organized civil society to contribute to audit work, broadening the reach of oversight measures… No one has more interest than the neighbour herself in making sure that the public works that benefit her community and her family are effectively performed.”

For the Spanish version of the blog, click here.

*Joaquín Caprarulo is coordinator of the democratic strengthening and open justice programs of the Civic Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ), Argentina.

Patricia Guillén Nolasco is manager of citizen participation in Peru’s General Comptroller of the Republic, which currently chairs OLACEFS’s Citizen Participation Committee.

Marcos Mendiburu is an expert in transparency, accountability and open government.