2016-10-20
On 20 October, Heads of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Supreme Audit Institutions signed a Memorandum of understanding and agreed on monitoring of the preparation for and implementation of the Rail Baltica project. The Memorandum was signed in Bratislava, at the meeting of the Contact Committee of the Heads of the Supreme Audit Institutions of the European Union and the European Court of Auditors.
The heads of the Supreme Audit Institutions who signed the Memorandum emphasize the strategic significance of the project not only for the Baltic states, but also for the entire European Union. It is a major complex project, and as such it involves a high risk of preparation and monitoring. Aware of the preventive importance of the monitoring, as well as of significance of independent audit, the parties have agreed on clear monitoring tasks in this project.
Heads of Finnish and Polish Supreme Audit Institutions were invited to attend as observers the signing ceremony of the Memorandum. They were consulted on the cooperation on the monitoring of the Rail Baltica project.
In June this year, the first meeting of the Monitoring Task Force Rail Baltica titled “Rail Baltica: Monitoring of Project Implementation and the Role of Supreme Audit Institutions” was held in Vilnius. It discussed project risks, possibilities of conducting a joint audit in the future, characteristics of public procurements and challenges in all three Baltic countries. The next meeting of the Task Force is planned to be held in Estonia in the beginning of 2017.