He has also been a member of the legal Committee of the unity of money laundering during the period from 2005 to 2012. He has participated in many international conferences concerned with combating corruption, terrorism and money laundering crimes. He participated in the two committees to amend the Egyptian Penal Code and the Terrorism Law.

The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020 had a severe, negative impact on SAIs' capabilities including the Accountability State Authority (ASA) of the Arab Republic of Egypt that required developing some work methods & processes as well as setting some approaches to face these challenges in order to ensure the ASA's continuity in carrying out its mandate.

We will hereafter present some of these challenges along with the relevant work methods developed by the ASA to face them as well as its methodology in carrying out its terms of reference and mandate as follows:

The Challenges imposed by Covid-19 Pandemic can be divided into:
1- Challenges on the human resources level.
2- Organizational challenges.
3- Challenges on the audit level.
4- Challenges on the audited entities' level.

Now, we present the challenges facing the ASA as well as its methods and methodologies to address them:

1- Challenges on the Human Resources Level :
• The necessity to abide with the precautionary measures such as social distancing and reducing the workforce.
• The increase of professional hazards as a result of the increasing exposure to the pandemic during work.
• Some infections have occurred among ASA auditors.
The ASA's methodology to face these challenges:
The ASA’s Presidency issued several resolutions to protect the human resources, including:
1) Resolutions to reduce the workforce through giving each head of accounts department or central department the power to apply employees' rotation according to work requirements.
2) Assigning a specialized company to periodically sterilize the ASA's headquarters, offices as well as placing sanitizers in its floors.
3) Obliging members to wear face masks, besides providing reduced prices for masks and disinfectants within the ASA headquarters, and establishing systems to monitor the compliance of personnel with the precautionary procedures.
4) Providing laboratories and radiology centers along with PCR tests to detect the infection using flexible procedures that enable ASA auditors and their families to confirm whether they are infected or not.
5) Providing vaccines for seasonal flu in the ASA's headquarters. The ASA assigned a number of hospitals to provide health care for the infected and provided various medicines for treatment as well as discussed the possibility to contract for providing COVID-19 vaccines once they are available.
6) Granting infected personnel or those in contact with infected patients a paid leave until complete recovery.
7) Paying full compensation and pensions to the ASA deceased members' relatives.
2- Organizational Challenges :
• Travel and transportation obstacles.
• Closure of some audited entities' premises.
• Difficulties in developing training programs relevant to new training needs that emerged due to the pandemic's circumstances.

The ASA's methodology to face these challenges:

1) The ASA has rationalized business trips and well organized them so as to suit the pandemic's conditions and thus acquire the maximum benefits from these work assignments.
2) The ASA has taken all precautionary measures with regards to its members' means of transportation, including the periodic sterilization of vehicles, and the emphasis on their commitment to wearing face masks and maintaining distancing measures during transportation and business trips.
3) The ASA auditors have contacted the audited entities' management in order to know how they would manage during the lockdown and until units' re-opening, besides agreeing on the means of communication with these entities to provide the ASA with the documents and data required for auditing.
4) Coordination with the audited entities towards developing their resources to meet the new requirements by using electronic devices of data transmission including faxes, scanners and others to be able to send documents as well as virtually hold meetings using specialized applications. Also, taking into consideration that some confidential interactions require that auditors should go to these units to review the data and its related documents in an organized and strictly limited manner.
5) Due to the urgent need for training to use the electronic methods for holding virtual meetings along with the emergence of some professional requirements for applying the audit standards in light of COVID-19 pandemic, the ASA's Central Department of Training and Continuous Education has taken the following measures:

 Providing preventive precautions in training facilities by reducing the number of trainees in each training program to the minimum together with re-holding the same course while maintaining the social distancing measures in these facilities. Also, obliging the trainees to comply with the precautionary procedures such as wearing face masks and using disinfectants.
 Mandating trainers to prepare and hold virtual training programs using e-communication means.
 Cooperating with other professional organizations, either local, regional or international, to benefit from their virtual training programs as well as participating in their virtual webinars and workshops.
 Increasing the effectiveness of the ASA’s electronic platform by providing scientific materials and responding to ASA auditors’ inquiries, as well as electronically providing research papers and professional guidance issued to the auditors either by the ASA or by local, regional and international professional organizations.

3- Challenges on the Audit Level:

(A) Technical challenges of auditing existing activities and audited entities :

• Challenges related to the audit process planning stage.
• Challenges related to the proof evidence collecting stage as well as the audit process implementation.
• Challenges related to reporting and issuing the audit reports.

The ASA's methodology to face these challenges:
Facing challenges related to planning:
Auditing is an assurance task ( ) that aims to enhance the confidence of the financial statements' users in the results of the assessment or measurement of the subject of the report by referring to the framework through which the financial statements were prepared ( ). The task of auditing the economic entities’ financial statements begins with the implementation process planning stage through developing the general audit strategy ( ), including understanding of the entity's environment and identifying its essential risks ( ). This primarily requires studying the appropriateness of the administration's implementation of the assumption of continuity( )as a basis for the preparation of the entity's financial statements. Continuity risks may arise in the profitable entities subject to ASA's auditing, or when it is probable that the government's subsidies are to be reduced or withdrawn, or in the case of privatization ( ) . The significant economic impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on many entities have led to an increasing doubt concerning the entity's ability to operate and also on the audited entity's audit risk assessments, either as a result of the nature of the normal course of business undertaken by the entity, or as a result of entity's inability to comply with the internal control requirements due to the pandemic or even the need for special internal control procedures for these entities. Accordingly, ASA auditors, in order to face these challenges in the planning stage, performed the following:

• Re-evaluating the audited entity' having the assumption of continuity during the COVID- 19 pandemic.

• Carrying out analytical procedures to assess the potential implications in the estimated financial statements of the audited entities to determine their impact on estimating the materiality of the financial statements' items( ) .
• Re-evaluating the inherent risks as well as the audit risks, either on the level of the financial statements as a whole or according to their items, and their impact on estimating the materiality.

Facing the Challenges Related to the Processes of Gathering Proof Evidence and Implementing the Audit Process: The most important challenge facing the evidence-gathering process during the COVID-19 pandemic is the need to apply the social distancing measures inside the audited entities which was an obstacle for obtaining audit evidence and thus required alternative procedures to obtain such evidence together with ensuring its sufficiency ( ) and appropriateness. Also, difficulties regarding supervising the inventory processes (observation), low rates of response to positive confirmations and difficulties in attending meetings either with audited entities or with governance officials as well as the difficulty of supervising audit teams or holding meetings with them. In order to face the challenges of the planning stage, the ASA members adopted the following procedures:
• Obtaining electronic copies of documents from the audited entities and increasing the documents' samples to increase the sufficiency of evidence.
• Choosing a sample of documents obtained using electronic means and comparing them to the original documents either through paying short visits to the audited entities or asking them to send the original documents and examining their match with the electronic copies previously obtained in order to ensure the authenticity of the documents obtained electronically.
• Obtaining management acknowledgments (letter of representation) and data requested electronically by the audited entity.
• Reviewing the resolutions made by the audited entities with regards to regulating the physical verification of inventory and observing the physical count of selected items of inventory to ensure compliance with inventory resolutions, obtain inventory results, perform alternative audit procedures to check on the inventory at subsequent dates, and retroactively confirm inventory results.
• Holding meetings with the entity’s management, with governance officials, and with audit teams using e-communications and virtual meetings. Facing the challenges related to reporting and audit reports:

The most important challenge facing audit reports is the need to disclose the circumstances and constraints imposed by the pandemic on the audit process, in addition to demonstrating the adequacy of the audited entity's disclosure of the pandemic's impacts, the extent to which their assets impaired, and the expected future impacts on revenues and assets.

• The ASA issued instructions that safeguarded the previous data is included in the annual report.
(B) - Challenges arising due to the emergence of new activities facing the pandemic which involved the expenditure of a considerable sum of funds as well as maintaining flexibility along with accountability and full transparency in their disbursement.
- COVID-19 pandemic has led to the urgent need to spend either on sanitization procedures , combating the pandemic or building new emergency hospitals as well as increasing the capacity of hospitals, intensive care units and ventilators in addition to providing the cost of medicine, treatments and vaccines that help alleviate the impacts of the disease.
- The ASA has raised awareness among its auditors of the need to perform control measures that will achieve flexibility in auditing such activities while preserving public funds and complying with the necessary audit procedures. 4- Challenges on the Audited Entities' Level:


• The delay in the preparation of the financial statements of some audited entities.
• The difficulty of some audited entities' departments to abide with some of the audit, accounting, and organizational requirements & procedures. The ASA's methodology in facing these challenges:


• Instructions were issued to the ASA members to make sure that there were real reasons for the delay in the preparation of the financial statements as well as to show flexibility in cases where the delay was inevitable in addition to maintaining legally binding dates as much as possible.
• Instructions were issued to the ASA members to examine the cases of non-compliance with audit, accounting and organizational procedures and the presence of a real necessity for such non-compliance as well as studying the sufficiency of the procedures performed for the preservation of the audited entities' funds with an emphasis on the audit procedures on those items in order to confirm them.

Conclusion:

The human resources department will continue to apply these measures as long as Covid-19 exists. It is worth noting that the measures and procedures that have been performed by the ASA of Egypt have largely succeeded in facing the challenges' impacts implied by the Covid-19 pandemic, yet the human resources department of ASA will continue its researches in order to reach a situation where ASA's performance is not affected at all by this pandemic.