Audit report: On the annual report of the Central Election Commission for 2021

The full financial audit report on the Central Election Commission's 2021 accounts, announced by the State Audit Office on 4 July 2022. Its section on the election management system (pages 20 to 24) finds that the acceptance testing the maintenance contracts required of the commission was neither performed nor documented by the commission, that the only acceptance-test protocol the auditors could identify had been produced by the developer, SIA SOAAR, and covered postal-voting functionality alone, that the system's first full rehearsal took place shortly before the June 2021 municipal elections leaving no time to fix defects, and that the developer's system-monitoring reports listed more than a thousand errors found in the system, which in the auditors' view showed that acceptance testing had not been complete. The auditors warn that failing to plan legal changes far enough ahead risks rushed funding, contracting and development work that conforms to neither good governance, nor IT-development good practice, nor appropriate security principles. The commission told the auditors it kept no record of the changes it ordered because requests were made in chat, phone calls and online meetings, and that with a single IT manager responsible for IT, security and project management, minuting was not a priority. This is the report cited in the complainant's submission reproduced in the commission's Decision No. 97.