THE PROCEDURES OF ABACC FOR AUDITING RECORDS

Early when the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) began operating, it started to establish its own inspection procedures, including the examination of records and their comparison with reports. The Nuclear Material Accounting Area of ABACC is responsible for the implementation of these procedures and also for the evaluation and follow-up of discrepancies. The methodology was developed taking into consideration that the majority of the inspectors do not work permanently for ABACC, but for nuclear organizations in Argentina or Brazil. The inspectors, (around thirty-five from each country) are convoked whenever necessary only for the inspection period (Brazilian inspectors carry out inspections in Argentina and Argentinean inspectors conduct inspections in Brazil). It was also considered that the staff of inspectors comprises persons with different background. This include safeguards experts who usually carry out inspections at a national level applying different auditing procedures, and experts in several areas of safeguard's (NDA, DA, operations and design of various types of facilities, etc.), having little experience in records auditing and accounting reports. Consequently, the procedures were defined to comply with the following requirements: a) to be applicable to records kept either in paper or in electronic form avoiding any action by the inspectors over the operators ledgers; b) to use working papers easy to complete and evaluate; c) to check the consistency between the accountancy database (from reports data) and the auditing database (from inspection data); d) to receive from the Operator/National Authority a declaration on the value of the Book Inventory as of the date of the inspection and, e) to be completely performed during the inspection in order to provide a preliminary summary of the results on books auditing to the Operator/National Authority at the end of the inspection and to limit to a minimum the need to consult the inspectors out of the inspection period. The procedure developed consists of three working papers named VR-A (summary form), VR-B (comparison form) and VR-C (updating form). A more detailed description of the method and the forms used are presented in the paper.