Report on the audit of the Danish government accounts for 2015

14-09-2016

Report no. 25/2015

The report concerns the results of Rigsrevisionen’s audit of the Danish government accounts for 2015. The government accounts represent the consolidated financial statements of the 20 ministries that were authorised to spend public funds and collect revenue on behalf of the government in 2015. 

The purpose of the audit was to assess the correctness of the information provided in the government accounts and to determine whether the ministries had managed and applied the public funds to the purposes intended by the Danish parliament. The report also supports the Danish Public Accounts Committee and the Danish parliament in their efforts to monitor and check up on the ministries. 

The report addresses some of the problems we encountered during the audit, including critical findings that led to qualified audit opinions and critical comments in our audit reports on the financial statements of the ministries. We also refer to a number of cases that we considered to be of special interest to the Public Accounts Committee although they were not severe enough to justify qualifications or critical comments. Examples of such cases would be government agencies and bodies that failed to secure the necessary authorisation for their transactions, various types of irregularities, circumvention of government regulations, errors and deficiencies in payroll administration, inadequate focus on economy and shortcomings in IT security. 

A section of the report has been reserved for presentation of the results of two audits conducted across a number of government agencies and bodies; the first one concerns audit findings relating to large one-off payments made by the universities to their employees, and the second one concerns measures taken by six government institutions to protect data by logging and monitoring user activity. 

The last section of the report summarises our audit of EU funds in Denmark with specific mention of a number of cases where the administration of EU funds can be further improved.

Read the 1st chapter of the report (PDF)