Box 1: PEFA CHECK criteria
1. The draft concept note is submitted for peer review before the in‐country assessment field work starts. The draft concept note/ToR is submitted to reviewers representing at least four PFM institutions. The peer reviewers should include the government assessed and the PEFA Secretariat and at least two other independent institutions from within or outside the country, such as development partners, PFM related NGOs, civil society groups or other governments.
2. A final version of the concept note is shared with all peer reviewers
3. The complete draft PEFA report is submitted to all peer reviewers for review. The peer reviewers should include the government assessed and the PEFA Secretariat and at least two other independent institutions from within or outside the country, such as development partners, PFM related NGOs, civil society groups or other governments. Peer reviewers are expected to provide comments or acknowledge “no comment” if they consider no changes are needed.
4. A revised draft PEFA report is prepared by the assessment team attaching a matrix with peer reviewers’ comments and assessment team responses. The PEFA Secretariat carries out a follow- up review which evaluates whether its comments have been addressed.
5. The final report is reviewed by the PEFA secretariat to ensure that the compliance indices for dimensions and indicators and the report coverage index are both higher than 85 percent. If any of the indices scores is below 85 percent, the PEFA secretariat will inform the assessment manager and highlight areas where compliance or coverage can be improved to meet or exceed 85 percent.
6. The assessment management and quality assurance arrangements are described in the PEFA report.
to the revised draft report and be provided to all reviewers. The matrix of comments need not be included in the published report.
The PEFA secretariat will only endorse a report with the PEFA Check when the final PEFA report reaches a predetermined level of compliance with the PEFA methodology and other endorsement conditions described above, have been met. This level of compliance is reflected by the combination of (i) the coverage rating of the report1, (ii) the compliance index at the dimension level and (iii) the compliance index at the indicator level3. All three indices are set to 85%.
Through the PEFA Check , the Secretariat verifies that the quality assurance arrangements surrounding
assessments have included adequate peer‐review processes that provided for participation by governments and PFM institutions, thus leading to more robust PEFA reports. It also ensures that a satisfactory level of compliance with PEFA guidance has been achieved.
Chapter 1 of the PEFA report is expected to identify the scope, methodology, and process of PEFA assessments. The PEFA 2016 Framework document4 recommends that assessors include a summary of the quality assurance arrangements used when compiling an assessment in Chapter 1 of the PEFA report. Inclusion of this summary is one of the six criteria of PEFA Check (as explained above).
