Citizen-Centered Oversight Approach Gains International Visibility in INTOSAI Journal
By Secom / Serint
The Citizen-Centered Oversight approach, developed by the TCU, has reached the international government auditing community. The third-quarter 2026 issue of the International Journal of Government Auditing, INTOSAI's official publication, features the article Citizen-Centered Performance Auditing: Lessons from Brazil's Federal Court of Accounts. The article is authored by auditors Klauss Henry Nogueira, Luiz Gustavo Gomes Andrioli, and Salvatore Palumbo. All three were part of the team that developed the approach and drafted the guide published by the TCU in 2025.
The article starts from a common diagnosis among audit institutions: many audits still focus on bureaucratic processes and institutional indicators without showing how government shortcomings affect citizens daily lives. In response, the article presents the TCU's guide, which organizes auditing into four stages: understanding the problem from the citizen's perspective, assessing the State's response, developing evidence-based solutions, and monitoring whether people's lives have actually improved. It also equips audit teams with a broader range of techniques, including interviews, complaint analysis, citizen journey mapping, empathy mapping, and recommendation-development workshops. The approach aligns with INTOSAI-P 12, which addresses the value of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) in making a difference to citizens lives.
The article describes three recent applications at the TCU:
- Individual Microentrepreneurs (MEIs): An audit related to the Custo Brasil initiative that administered 262 questionnaires at events across the country and uncovered barriers that are not readily apparent in official indicators.
- Aquaculture: An audit that consulted small-scale producers to understand the barriers to formalization and access to public policies.
- Professional Councils: An audit that proposed the Citizen Commitment initiative, featuring effectiveness indicators developed in collaboration with civil society and ongoing monitoring through a public dashboard.
The article also highlights the challenges of the approach, including rigorously assessing qualitative evidence, ensuring representative participation, and translating citizens perceptions into measurable audit criteria.
The article builds on the TCU's ongoing efforts to put citizens at the center of its work, as established under Strategic Guideline 1, Citizen in Focus, of its 2025 2027 Management Plan. According to the authors, the approach does not replace traditional methods but complements them, helping ensure that audits are technically sound and more meaningful to society.
The article is available on the INTOSAI Journal website in English, Spanish, French, German, and Arabic. Read the article here.
The Citizen-Centered Oversight: A Guide for Auditors (TCU, 2025) is available here.