During the
Swedish rule in Finland, a governmental agency named
Kamarirevisio was established in 1695 to oversee the
Crown's financial administration. Its name was changed to
Kamarioikeus in 1799. At the beginning of the
autonomy of Finland, supervision of state
taxation and
auditing belonged to the
Senate's Chamber Office, which established the
revisiokonttori for this purpose. By the Senate's regulation, an independent agency named
Yleinen revisionioikeus was established on December 16, 1824, which included the revisiokonttori. The agency was led by a commissioner. Its task was to audit the state accounts, and the role of the court was to handle any detected abuses and to bring possible charges. The revisionioikeus was eventually transferred from the Chamber Office to the State Treasury Office. The name of the agency was shortened by a new regulation issued on December 29, 1923, to
Yleinen revisionilaitos. The revision court continued under its authority until it was replaced in 1931 by a board of revision. The Act on the Audit of State Finances was passed on December 23, 1947, and the National Audit Office began its operations the following year. According to the law, the National Audit Office was tasked with auditing the legality and appropriateness of state financial management and overseeing the implementation of the
budget, which remain its main tasks to this day. The general accounting of the state and the preparation of the state financial statements were transferred to the
State Treasury by a regulation issued on April 14, 1965. The tasks of the NAO were expanded in 1993 to include the supervision of the State Guarantee Fund and, along with it, bank support, and in 1995 the supervision of financial transfers between Finland and the
European Union. Since 2001, the National Audit Office has operated as an independent agency under the Parliament, separate from the Ministry of Finance, as the Constitution, which entered into force in 2000, required the agency to be functionally independent. The supervision of
party funding was transferred from the Ministry of Justice to the NAO from the beginning of 2016. The Parliamentary Ombudsman issued a reprimand in December 2020 to the Director General of the NAO,
Tytti Yli-Viikari, and to the Director in charge of legal affairs, Mikko Koiranen. The reprimand concerned the fact that Yli-Viikari and Koiranen had concluded an agreement in the spring of 2016, whereby a senior inspector at the agency was paid full salary without any work obligation for the second half of 2016 and half salary from the beginning of 2017 to the end of July 2018. ==Organization==