In the week of 14-18 April 2008 the State Audit Office (SAO) organised the kick-off meetings for the audit teams of three pilot audits.
Two audits are follow - up audits and the goal of this type of audit is to assess whether the recommendations of the SAO of the last performed audits have been implemented by the auditee. The third audit is a system based audit.

The meetings were supported by an expert of the Netherlands Court of Audit (NCA), Mr. John Lammerding, Together with his colleague, Mr. Dirk Knol, also an expert from the NCA, they assist the Macedonian auditors during the execution and reporting stage of the audits.

The SAO has already implemented the system based audit approach in its daily working practice. In this period, the Dutch expert and the Macedonian auditors, in an open dialogue, shared their experience about this audit approach including methodology issues, manuals, guidelines and working papers.

The discussions demonstrated very high motivation of the auditors.The audits carried out by the Macedonian auditors showed that this approach, based on an ongoing risk assessment, is an efficient approach. The SAO receives continuous assistance from its peers at the NCA on different topics under the bilateral twinning arrangement between the NCA and SAO funded by the Netherlands Embassy for the period 2005-2008.