The Government has been working to promote the achievement of its cleantech objectives through public procurement. However, new types of cleantech acquisitions involve the risk of failure. In order to ensure that the opportunities created by the acquisitions can be exploited, public-sector organisations must have the capacity to tolerate and manage the risks arising from them. This can be achieved through a variety of means.

In its report on the future of work, the World Economic Forum listed complex problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity among the skills critical for the future. The National Audit Office recognised the two first ones as key factors long ago. What about creativity? Can creativity be associated with auditing, a disciplined activity, and an institution with supervision as its main task? Quite well in fact. In this blog series, we discuss the changes occurring in the audit work of the National Audit Office of Finland and our operating environment from the perspective of our renewed strategy.

For a long time now, ambitious policy objectives have been set for public procurement, but systematically utilising procurement to achieve the objectives has been surprisingly difficult. Why is the task so challenging and what could be done about it? The National Audit Office of Finland offered some answers to these questions in connection with its audits of environmentally friendly public procurement that were completed early this year.

The audit and monitoring activities of the National Audit Office are based on the audit plan. The plan is based on the National Audit Office’s own operating environment analyses and macroeconomic risk analyses of central government finances.

Most parties comply with the regulations on funding in the Act on Political Parties, but there is room for improvement in the case of some procedures. The National Audit Office annually audits political party funding, reviewing financial statements and accounting of the audited entities from a period of several years. The purpose is to verify that the statutory funding disclosures are submitted correctly, comprehensively and at the right time to the public electronic party funding register maintained by the NAOF. The NAOF also audits the state subsidies of political parties represented in Parliament (also called party subsidies).

Finland has pledged to meet the European-wide target under which the number of road deaths should be reduced and other road safety improvements achieved. The strategic steering of police traffic control should be enhanced so that the targets set for traffic control can be met. There has been a reduction in national steering and coordination over the past five years, and fewer road safety measures are also drafted in central government.