| Resumo: | Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) have recently undergone major paradigm shifts regarding their role and purpose
in the public framework, starting from simple guardians of public finances to becoming a provider of consultancy and
foresight for the optimization of public mechanisms and policies. However, the current trend stems from their own
preoccupation for social accountability and relevance, while their legal framework lags behind, often antiquated in
design and approach. Furthermore, the diversity in SAIs’ mandates, organizational models and relation to legislature,
coupled with somewhat overlapping SAI theoretical models, led us to perform an in-depth research on the constitutional
and legal framework of EU member states’ SAIs, in order to better bring to light their constitutional or parliamentary
origins, the relation to governments and parliaments and their governance typology.
The research contributes by adding clarity to a less-researched field – that of supreme audit institutions and their
legal foundation. To our best knowledge, this is the first EU-wide comparative study of the constitutional al legal
framework that underpins the member states’ SAIs and its results help better classify some of the European SAIs, even
changing some of their governing models from their own description.
|
|---|