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It would allow saving on working time spent on doing routine accounting activities and use this time more for financial management, which helps to use public funds better and more expediently, the audit office said in its report.

The government decided to transfer the financial, personnel and wage accounting of all ministries and authorities in their area of government to the State Shared Service Center in 2015. A decision was also made to start concentrating the organization of public procurements to the State Shared Service Center, the objective of which is a better quality and economic savings of both carrying out public procurements as well as of the items and services to be purchased.

An audit of the National Audit Office indicates that the quality of financial, personnel and wage accounting has improved as a result of introducing common accounting standards, implementing common business software and concentrating accounting to both the support services units of ministries as well as subsequently to the State Shared Service Center.

The improvement of the situation has been ensured foremost by the implementation of common information systems. Efficiency has also been improved by specialisation that took place in the course of centralisation, where concentrating similar work segments has enabled organising work more effectively, thereby reducing the number of employees.

According to the assessment of the National Audit Office, the State Shared Service Center has a well-functioning internal audit system that enables providing high-quality services to state authorities.

Although the State Shared Service Center has not been offering the service of carrying out public procurements for long, activities to date do provide a basis for concluding that accompanying risks have been taken into consideration and have been attempted to be mitigated upon carrying out large public procurements. First procurements have also obtained lower prices in comparison with earlier procurements. However, the skills of procurement specialists must be developed and harmonized in order to serve as a competence center and offer comprehensive assistance to authorities in procurement activities.

Carrying out the project of centralizing support services has proven to be one-quarter more expensive than planned. The main reason for the project being more expensive is the price increase of developing and implementing the self-service portal for state employees (RTIP), because which functionalities the project should have and what costs it would bring were not analyzed thoroughly enough upon creating RTIP. However, RTIP has now been well-implemented and helps save time spent on accounting.

The actual cost of the project during the period 2010–2016 was 6.83 million euros, 4.13 million of which was used for investments and 2.7 million euros for operating costs.

As the National Audit Office finds based on the results of the audit that the quality of accounting has improved and accounting has become more effective in state authorities, it would be beneficial to analyze the implementation of a similar model in local governments, that is concentrating the accounting services to central units in order to improve the quality of accounting and make work more effective. It would allow saving on time spent on doing routine accounting activities and use this time more for financial management, which helps to use public funds better and more expediently.