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ROME, Italy—The
Philippines’ Commission on Audit (COA) assumes its
four-year appointment as external auditor of the Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
(UN), based here in Rome.
Accepting the appointment here is a
five-member COA team led by chairman Renato Villar. The
four-year project will earn for the Philippines $1.8
million and recognizes the Filipinos’ skills in
accounting and other financial expertise.
Philippine Ambassador to Italy Philippe
Lhuillier—also the country’s permanent representative to
the FAO—led the campaign, which started mid-2007. Former
COA chairman Guillermo Carague was also instrumental in
clinching the bid.
The campaign involved presentations by
all candidates of their proposed audit plans before the
nine-member FAO finance committee. At that time, the
committee was chaired by the representative from
Pakistan. The Philippines won over several European and
African auditing agencies for this position.
Lhuillier said the COA team here will be
instrumental in the ongoing reform process within the UN
agency as it adopts the International Public Sector
Accounting Standards (Ipsas). These are a set
of accounting standards adopted for use by multilateral
agencies all over the world. The FAO is just starting to
implement Ipsas in its projects to conform with the
new global standards.
The COA campaign won the position
largely because of the team’s long experience in
auditing UN work. They used to handle the same position
for Unicef (UN International Children’s Fund) and many
other UN project-specific operations such as those in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as the Oil for Food program
in Iraq. It recently wrapped up its work on the UN
Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary
Questions based in New York.
The auditing agency also campaigned for
a similar position for the International Labor
Organization (ILO) based in Geneva, Switzerland, at the
same time as it campaigned for FAO. However, the ILO
position went to another UN member-country.
Details on how many COA staffers will be
based in Rome are still being discussed within the UN
organization. However, one requirement of the position
is that COA will have to conduct regular field audits of
all FAO operations all over the world. The previous
auditor, which is India, had a staff complement of 50
spread out in all FAO projects. |
