In late 2018 the State Audit Institution of the United Arab Emirates (SAI UAE) along with other 14 Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs)[1] signed up in a research project on a Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related topic that was launched by the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI) of which SAI UAE and the other 14 participants are members.  The research project is about audit on implementation of SDGs and specifically asks the project team to explore ways that enable leveraging digital or big data to achieve the SDGs.  SAI UAE accepted to take the leadership of the project and has since been steering the project team to address the project’s question.  The term of the project is two and a half years ending at the 15^th ASOSAI Assembly that is scheduled to be held in Thailand in 2021.

The aim of the project was to come up with a model that will aid the auditor in leveraging digital or big data to help in the achievement of SDGs.  The team members have been working actively since the inception of the project.  The project involved both in-person and virtual meetings, and exchanges of country practices and experiences.  Moreover, the project utilized INTOSAI resources and explored the relevance of the ISSAIs to the project’s topic.

The project team under the leadership of SAI UAE has been undergoing thorough and insightful discussions and research that have left the team with a significant progress in reaching a practical model for leveraging big data.  The suggested model is based on ISSAI-100 Fundamental Principles of Public Sector Auditing and was developed to bring conformity of the research outcome with INTOSAI’s guidelines.  The research of countries’ experiences revealed that leveraging big data can be enabled by sustaining the following elements:

• Policy coherence
• Management of information
• Clear accountability lines

The project’s team unanimously agreed that the above elements are essential for the purpose of obtaining relevant, usable and analyzable data that can be leveraged for the benefit of achieving the SDGs.  There was a consensus that gaining data in such form requires working on the roots of the cause which in this case is the government’s policy for implementing one or more SDGs.  In line with IDI’s SDGs Audit Model (ISAM), policy coherence ensures that there exists no conflicts with other policies that serve other SDGs and thus prevent seeing trade-offs.  It also prevents duplications and overlaps between the different departments on both horizontal (within the central government) and vertical (national, regional and local governments) levels.

The project’s team ensured the compatibility of the above elements with the ISSAI-100.  The project’s team had the advantage of being a multi-national team that was enough to test the model’s functionality and applicability in different environments.  The scope of the project also allowed looking into other angles for enhancing the model.  To get the best results from applying the model, the latter is supported by data maturity – IT audit matrix that evaluates the maturity of the data that were generated as a result of government activities together with the controls of the systems through which the data is flowing.

Furthermore, the element of accountability lines in the ISSAI-100 tool was, too, supported by recalling the reporting framework for effective audit reports that is laid out in ISSAI-12 Value and Benefits of Supreme Audit Institutions in addition to the reporting framework established by ISSAI-100.

The ISSAI-100 model for leveraging digital or big data to achieve the SDGs reflects a practical tool for SAIs that stimulates producing government data in the form that is relevant, analyzable, achieving a reasonable level of reliability.

The team is now preparing to embark on drafting the research paper for submission to the 56^th ASOSAI Governing Board meeting and the 15^th ASOSAI Assembly.