David Colmenares | 17-02-2023
The twenty-eight anniversary of the Central American and Caribbean Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (OCCEFS) has just been celebrated. In 1995, in the city of San Salvador, the SAIs of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama decided to form an alliance to promote the integration and strengthening of the SAIs of Central America: the Central American Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (OCEFS). Later, the SAI of the Dominican Republic and the Comptroller's Office of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE) would join the new Organization.
With the incorporation of the Dominican Republic into the Organization, the decision was made to reform the Statutes of the OCEFS to change its name to the Central American and Caribbean Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (OCCEFS). In 2003, the Comptroller General's Office of the Republic of Cuba was accepted as a member of the OCCEFS, the Auditor General of Belize would do the same in 2007, the Office of the Comptroller of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 2015 and the Superior Audit of the Federation of Mexico, in 2019.
The OCCEFS is a subregional group of the Latin American and Caribbean Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (OLACEFS), autonomous and apolitical, whose objective is to promote the strengthening of the SAIs of Central America and the Caribbean through cooperation and technical assistance on the various issues related to the oversight of public funds. Through the OCCEFS, the eleven SAIs that comprise it study and analyze audit processes and methodologies and develop joint projects that contribute to the improvement of their capabilities and their independence.
The supreme body of the Organization is its General Assembly, in which its eleven members participate, and it has the support of the Presidency -in charge of the Court of Accounts of the Republic of El Salvador- and the Executive Secretariat -headed by the Court of Accounts of the Republic of Honduras-. In addition, it has four committees: Communication and Image, Legal Affairs, Capacity Building, and Strategic Planning.
Currently, as part of the OCCEFS, the Superior Audit of the Federation coordinates the Capacity Building Committee (CIC), which was created in 2017, with the purpose of managing initiatives for the sustainable development of the capabilities of both the Organization and its member SAIs. Under the coordination of the ASF, the CIC prepared a Diagnosis of the Training Needs of the OCCEFS regarding knowledge for the oversight of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), developed two cycles of Webinars, one on public integrity and ethics and another on the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda, and a Regional Oversight Meeting, in which good governance, transparency, prevention and the fight against corruption were discussed. In addition, the ASF implemented the digital course "General overview for the oversight of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development," which, in 2022, was taken by more than four hundred officials of the SAIs of OCCEFS and OLACEFS. In its first twenty-eight years of life, the OCCEFS has distinguished itself by being a space in which, thanks to the bonds of friendship, solidarity and mutual cooperation, as well as respect for the democratic system, current topics on government control and oversight are discussed and analyzed, good practices are shared and technical assistance is accessed, which has in turn contributed to strengthening the capabilities of each of the eleven SAIs that comprise it.
Some documents on this page are saved in PDF format.
To view these documents, you must have the following free program installed.
