The aim of this article has been to develop a communication strategy that will allow Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) to enhance their transparency and accountability to target groups. The study emphasizes the fact that these organizations should base their strategy on three fundamental props—target audience, message, and channels of communication. Defining the target audience and the message and revealing the most common ways of getting the message across have been the backbone of the theory put forward in this article. The analysis highlights the need for SAIs to aim their communication strategy at an increasingly wider audience which will, in turn, receive different messages via both traditional and new media.

In the past, Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) rarely publicized their work. In the 1990s, a few began to publish booklets and brochures for popular consumption and to establish ties with the media. These days, SAIs are concerned about communication. A communication policy completes their cycle of accountability, justifies their existence, is an essential component of their independence and efficiency and brings about measures which assess the impact of their work.The aim of this article is to analyse the latest communication strategies developed by SAIs in order to publicize the results of their activity and to provide the public with an overall vision of what they do. The study, based on a questionnaire sent out to European Union SAIs, highlights the fact that these bodies undertake wide-ranging communication activities involving a close relationship with the media and the use of Internet websites. Points for practitioners This article explores the most recent developments in European Union SAI communication strategy. Based on survey research, the study concludes that SAIs maintain a close relationship with the media and have been able to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the Internet to publish their results and to provide users with an overview of their work. For SAIs, this analysis allows them to be graded in terms of their relationship with the media and how they use Internet websites. Hence it will be possible to establish criteria leading to improvements or maintenance of their relative situation.

This paper aims to analyze the impact of auditor tenure on audit quality. The research is motivated by the absence of consensus in published works, and by the scarcity of studies carried out on non-profit organizations. Using a sample of 254 audits carried out between 2003 and 2010 on Spanish state-owned foundations, we find that, although foundation audit quality decreases as tenure length increases, this quality loss does not become apparent until the sixth year of the foundation–auditor relationship, after an initial five years of improvement in quality. The empirical evidence is important for regulators and financial statement users, given that it suggests the need for the introduction of tenure-reducing measures which, at the same time, also ensure a minimum tenure period