Poland in Palestine

The Republic of Poland has started another project supporting the Palestinian Authority.

On 18 January 2021 Poland and Palestine have joined efforts to enhance the accountability of the Palestinian public funds spending and income generation. The Supreme Audit Office of Poland (NIK) will closely cooperate with the State Audit and Administrative Control Bureau of Palestine (SAACB) for 27 months in the framework of the EU-funded Twinning Project and with the support from the Representative of the Republic of Poland to Palestine, with a common goal of developing new and strengthening the existing skills and capabilities of the Palestinian public auditors.

The Project Strengthening the capacities of the State Audit and Administrative Control Bureau and supporting the Bureau to become an independent, efficient and effective external audit institution in line with INTOSAI standards will focus on three thematic components:

•  Improvement of SAACB’s capacity to undertake financial and compliance audits,
• Improvement of SAACB´s capacities to carry out tax and customs audit,
• Improvement of quality and efficiency of audits by means of big data auditing. 

Each component will be managed by a Component Leader from Poland, supported by selected experts from NIK. They will cooperate with their Palestinian counterparts in order to identify areas of the SAACB activity to be strengthened, and together they will find and implement appropriate solutions. Highly ranked officials from NIK and SAACB were selected as Project Leaders in order to ensure that the overall results of the undertaking are achieved. The cooperation is based on the principle of partnership and peer-to-peer support rather than a simple transfer of knowledge and audit tools. As a result of the cooperation between the Twinning Partners, the best and “tailor-designed” solutions compatible with the Palestinian legal system will be implemented.

NIK delegated a special advisor, whose role is to coordinate the project’s activities and to organise the cooperation with SAACB on a daily basis so that the implementation of the Project goes smoothly and effectively. He will stay in SAACB for the whole period of the Project implementation and will act as a liaison officer between the two administrations.

The Twinning instrument is a part of the European Union’s European Neighbourhood Policy and is entirely financed by the European Union.

Poland is among the most active EU Member States in terms of Twinning Projects implementation in the recent years. NIK itself has already implemented a number of similar projects: in Georgia, Albania, Azerbaijan and Kosovo. It is worth noting that the Polish project with SAACB is only the second Twinning realised in Palestine so far.