the report states that “the publicly disclosed reports by the International Board of Auditors for NATO covering the annual activities and financial statements of NATO bodies and agencies fulfil NATO’s responsibility to inform the public about its expenditures”. However, again this is only a partial picture. At the Wales Summit in 2014, following criticism from the official auditing body of the Dutch government, NATO leaders charged the organization with improving financial transparency and accountability and to report back progress at the next summit. But there has been little, if any, reporting back on financial transparency at subsequent NATO summits. The Warsaw Summit declaration (in 2016) effectively restated the earlier commitment, while the five subsequent summits (Brussels 2017, Brussels 2018, London 2019, Brussels 2021 and Madrid 2022) failed to provide any progress report in this area.
NATO’s Resource Policy and Planning Board, which is a subsidiary body of the North Atlantic Council, for the first time publicly released a five-page executive summary of its 2015 Annual Report and did so again for the 2017 Annual Report (but has not done so since). This report assesses the performance of military common funding within NATO and reviews the financial situation of the NATO Security Investment Programme and the civil and military budgets. Thus, while public disclosure of reports by the International Board of Auditors for NATO is welcome, it hardly represents fulfilment of NATO’s responsibility to inform the public about its expenditures.
In addition to essential public disclosure reform, a broader debate within NATO is needed as to the purpose of the annual report and what goes in it. More needs to be done to link forecast performance and actual performance. This requires NATO having a set of appropriate measures and robust systems to
collect the results, followed by independent (as well as in-house) analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of the information. It also requires greater public access to information. As we said 10 years ago, the Secretary General’s annual report is not an end in itself,but should be the starting point for reporting NATO’s performance story.
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