A well-functioning government office acts as a co-ordinator of the decision-making system and as such is crucial for the government’s capacity to define and pursue its collective objectives. The “Government Office” is a generic term that refers to the institution(s) at the centre of...

The public service in central and eastern Europe has to adapt to an enormous number of changes in a very short time. The staff is faced with a constantly changing regulatory framework which needs implementation and enforcement, as well as new demands from the growing private sector and the...

This paper is the result of a comparison of the audit practices with respect to the audit of secret and politically sensitive subjects by the Supreme Audit Institutions (SAI’s) of France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Not only do the practices differ but the mandate and...

Assessing the Impacts of Proposed Laws and Regulations deals with policy assessment and Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA), or the ex ante assessment of how proposed legislation and regulations will affect a country’s economy, society, budget and existing laws, international agreements, etc....

This publication is a tool for designers of new civil service pension schemes in central and eastern Europe. It presents civil service pension schemes in five OECD Member countries and ten central and eastern European countries. In most central and eastern European countries, people employed in...

This is a report on human resources management practices in the public administrations of four central and eastern European countries: Albania, Estonia, Hungary and Poland. The report is based on information from 1996. Since then significant changes have occurred in at least two of the...

Countries that are candidates for European Union (EU) accession face the complex and urgent task of building administrative institutions so that they can fulfil the “Copenhagen criteria”. Such institutions must be able to implement the acquis communautaire within tight budget constraints and...

This paper focuses primarily on the issue of how to achieve high quality in the audit process. In addition to describing the types of procedures needed to achieve quality, however, it discusses basic principles and those matters of institutional management that create an environment that...

The SIGMA Paper is drawn from a report on relations between Supreme Audit Institutions and parliamentary committees, prepared for the network of Presidents of the Supreme Audit Institutions of Central and Eastern Countries, Cyprus, Malta and the European Court of Auditors, as part of their...

This publication is based on a Sigma paper and on reports by EU Member States prepared in 2005 at the request of several new Member States. The original paper and some Member State reports were then used as background documentation for a Sigma workshop for countries in the CARDS region on the...