In response to the “Budget Outline Law” and its complementary regulations, as well as the requirements of electronic format for the accounts presented by public departments, the Commission of Audit (CA) held an explanatory session on the relevant assistance tools for electronic data on 17 March, inviting more than 20 representatives from six special institutions and the Financial Bureau to participate.

With a view to further promote the implementation of computer-aided audit, CA recently completed the upgrade and enhancement of the Auditor Office with the assistance of the IT Center of China National Audit Office, and meanwhile the new relevant assistance tools for electronic data have been developed to facilitate all public departments to be subject to audit supervision under the law. According to the Commissioner of Audit’s Instruction No. 2/2019, public departments should prepare and submit specified electronic files for the management account, accounting and financial management information of the previous fiscal year in accordance with the electronic data format or model form required as CA.

These newly developed assistance tools for electronic data have been officially sent to public departments to use. Their design feature is that they are fully compatible with the Macao public accounting system, and the support function for auditing has been significantly optimized in response to actual needs. Given that the tools are used by public departments, CA has striven to make the interface resemble the old version, so that the users can adapt to them as soon as possible.

Since it is the first time for special institutions to use the relevant assistance tools, CA particularly held this explanatory session to introduce the operation of the assistance tool for the export and import of CSV file and the assistance tool for verifying electronic data, assisting public departments in verifying whether their electronic CSV data meets the relevant data specifications, in order to deepen the participants’ understanding of the functions of tools.