The Oversight and Audit Service was, until 2011, a temporary body within the Central Electoral Commission, tasked with monitoring the contributions to, the accounting and use of pre-election funds of candidates, parties and party alliances participating in national elections.

In its 2010 evaluation report on Armenia in Transparency of Party Funding,[1] the Group of States of Corruption (GRECO) stressed that “the independence of the monitoring institutions is insufficient. […] while the CEC is an independent body, it is composed of a majority of representatives of political parties, which may result in a lack of a determined and proactive approach towards supervision. The first stage of the supervision is carried out by the CEC’s Oversight and Audit Service, which is composed of four seconded public officials. There are no measures in place, such as rules on incompatibilities or limitations of the number of mandates, to prevent conflicts of interest and undue interference in the work of the Oversight and Audit Service, nor of the CEC itself. The Oversight and Audit Service, which is only a temporary body established in election periods, clearly lacks sufficient professional staff and financial resources to go beyond a mere formal check of the documents submitted by the parties and candidates, all the more as it has to verify the declarations on pre-election funds within 20 days of their submission. While both the Service and the CEC may request additional information from the parties and candidates and are vested with investigative powers, including access to information from other institutions (e.g. banks), the evidence collected by the [GRECO team] clearly indicates that these powers are hardly used in practice and that no cross-checks are performed to verify the accuracy of the data contained in the declarations. […] The CEC and the Ministry of Justice have no competence to impose administrative sanctions.” The GRECO thus recommended “to ensure that an independent and integrated mechanism is in place for the monitoring of the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns, and that it is given the mandate, the authority and the financial and staff resources to effectively and pro-actively supervise such funding, to investigate alleged infringements of political financing regulations and, as appropriate, to impose sanctions.”

The Armenian Government decided to address the lack of enforcement of campaign finance regulations and amended in 2011 the Electoral Code and the law on political parties. As a result, the Oversight and Audit Service is now a permanent body with a mandate to review both the funding of political parties and election campaigns and has to draw up statements on candidates’ declarations that are then submitted to the CEC for discussion and review. The GRECO, in its 2012 compliance report,[2] underlined that “Positive measures include the new non-partisan composition of the Central Electoral Commission, a reinforcement of the independence of the members of the Oversight and Audit Service from political parties,[3] as well as the fact that the staff resources of the service have visibly been increased and that administrative sanctions may now be imposed by the Central Electoral Commission.”