ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which two state audit institutions – in the United Kingdom and Canada – responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. It explains how they continued to produce useful knowledge for their respective Parliaments about the use of huge sums of public money (much of it unplanned and distributed with urgency) for the purposes of accountability and learning, despite the exceptional circumstances. It considers how their staff adapted to remote working and altered both the focus and type of work they undertook and the pace at which they did it. The chapter highlights how both bodies exploited their existing knowledge and powers and emphasizes the crucial importance of timeliness and flexibility in order to be useful to parliamentarians desperate for reliable information in the emergency. The chapter also argues that, as well as providing credible, up-to-date analysis, the work of the two bodies – widely seen as accurate, authoritative, and objective – will continue to be of considerable value in the longer term as the authorities seek to learn lessons from the pandemic.
