The Commissioner of Audit Ho Veng On presented the “Audit Report on the General Account 2018” to the Legislative Assembly today, specifying the main content of financial audit and the aspects that deserve special attention.
Ho Veng On stated that according to the audit result, the 2018 General Account of Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR) has been prepared in accordance with laws, reflecting, in all material aspects, the execution or operation results of SAR Government in 2018 under the respective adoptive systems, and the financial position as at 31 December 2018. Therefore, the Commissioner of Audit expressed an unqualified opinion on the 2018 General Account of MSAR.
Besides, he expressed that the total amount of revenue, expenses and assets of “Government’s Integrated Ordinary Account” approximately reached to 141.3 billion, 83 billion and 156.1 billion respectively, covering the financial statistics of the Treasury and 43 non-autonomous departments, and the management accounts of 12 departments with administrative autonomy and 39 autonomous institutions, with a total of about 1.87 million accounting records. The balance of Financial Reserve demonstrated in the note of Integrated Account was about 508.8 billion, involving about 790 thousand accounting records. As to the “Special Institutions’ Aggregated Account”, the total amount of revenue, expenses and assets stood at about 20.2 billion, 12.5 billion and 399.7 billion respectively, including 8 special institutions with about 1.51 million accounting records.
Ho Veng On pointed out that the workload of auditing the “Special Institutions’ Aggregated Account” and the Financial Reserve has increased every year, mainly due to the rapid development of the accounting theories of accrual basis and its practices; in addition, the investment vehicles involved are more complicated and diversified, including the financial derivatives mainly for hedging risk and the investment of non-exchange traded securities in the form of funds, which has greater risk, was made for a higher investment returns. Among them, some private equity funds that are not guided by the Government have a significant stake in the overall investment, increasing the risk of investment. Therefore, in response to this new situation, CA has continually allocated substantial audit resources when verifying the actual situation at the end of year of the above investments and estimating their value.
As the Budget Framework Law was promulgated in 2017 and come into effect in 2018, the MSAR Government implemented the new public accounting system, and CA will update the Instruction of the Commissioner of Audit according to the new system in order to continue to effectively collect the accounts and financial information of auditee from next year.
Since the functions of the original audit system are no longer satisfy the requirement of audit work under the new system, CA actively signed the “Cooperation Memorandum” with the IT Center of China National Audit Office and authorized it to provide technical supervision for the update and modification of the Auditor Office (Macau version) in order to meet the development needs. These related work has been fully implemented as schedule. Meanwhile, in order to in line with the MSAR Government policy target of promoting electronic governance, CA also developed a “Computer Program for Verification of Electronic Data” for various government departments to use in response to the new public accounting system. This Program assists departments in pre-checking whether the format is correct and the files are complete before they submit the electronic data to CA so as to improve the efficiency of the related procedures.
2019 is the year in which the work of General Account audit has an in-depth adjustment to prepare the new development of the MSAR Government and the informatization construction moves into a new era. The work in response to the new situations and trends is conducted orderly according to the established plans. In the conference, Ho Veng On said that CA will continue to perform its supervision function in accordance with laws, promote the comprehensive standardization of financial management and strive to improve the governance performance.
According to the established procedures, the Commissioner of Audit’s reports, which showed the audit result of the “Government’s Integrated Ordinary Account” and the “Special Institutions’ Aggregated Account”, together with two sets of financial statements, formed the “Audit Report on the General Account 2018”. The Audit Report was submitted to the Chief Executive once completed, with copy to the Legislative Assembly, and was presented in the Legislative Assembly. Full text of the Audit Report can be downloaded from CA’s website, and is freely available at CA Office during office hours.
