In January 2026, the National Audit Department of Malaysia (NAD) marked its 120th year as the nation’s custodian of public funds with a celebration and a transformative agenda to modernize the nation’s audits. Auditor General Dato’ Seri Wan Suraya Wan Mohd Radzi unveiled a department-wide digital transformation program designed to modernize audit processes, strengthen data-driven auditing and enhance transparency. The project has been described as one of the most significant transformation initiatives in NAD’s 120-year history.
“This digital transformation will change the landscape of public-sector auditing towards a more data-driven, transparent and real-time system,” Wan Suraya said in her address to celebration attendees. “Audit is not about finding fault, but is an important instrument to drive improvement and create meaningful impact in public-sector governance,” she said.
This commitment to strengthening governance is supported by NAD’s digital transformation initiatives. Among them is the e-SelfAudit system, which leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics to ensure 100% audit coverage of all gazetted entities. Complementing this is the Auditor General’s Dashboard, a public-facing platform that enhances transparency by enabling stakeholders to monitor the implementation of follow-up actions arising from audit findings.
As the nation’s chief auditor, Wan Suraya leads a department of more than 2,000 officers dedicated to strengthening accountability and transparency in the management of public funds. And now NAD’s role has been significantly enhanced through the amendment to Malaysia’s Audit Act of 1957, approved in 2024. Wan Suraya played a key role in supporting the government's initiative to amend the Audit Act, so that the auditor general is empowered to adopt a wider and more comprehensive audit approach. These include the power to audit entities receiving government financial guarantees, the introduction of the Follow the Public Money audit approach, the power to issue audit-related guidelines, the power to make recommendations on serious irregularities and the power to conduct follow-up audits on matters raised in the auditor general’s reports.
Wan Suraya told anniversary celebrants that this new authority has strengthened governance in Malaysia, and consequently, the well-being of its citizens. The Act was last amended in 1991, more than three decades ago.
Since the 2024 amendments to the Audit Act, the department has strengthened its audit coverage and follow-up activities across a broader range of public-sector entities, supported by digital tools such as the e-SelfAudit system. By enabling a timelier identification of risks and closer monitoring of corrective actions, these initiatives have helped drive tangible improvements in public service delivery. For example, audit findings related to the Rural Water Supply Project in Sarawak prompted remedial measures that improved living conditions for more than 1,400 residents.
The new mandate and technological transformation are part of a wider reform agenda to strengthen transparency, accountability and anti-corruption efforts in Malaysia. By enhancing audit coverage, digital-monitoring and follow-up mechanisms, the National Audit Department is better positioned to support stronger governance and help prevent serious financial mismanagement. These reforms also reflect lessons learned from past governance challenges, including high-profile cases such as 1MDB, which underscored the importance of robust institutional checks and timely oversight.
As a public servant with more than 30 years working in Malaysia’s civil service, Wan Suraya is well-positioned to lead the way for reform. Her background working in various governmental entities, including as a trade official, might seem unconventional for an auditor general — and briefly contested by the opposition party in Parliament — but it aligns with Malaysia’s goals. Before being appointed to the role by the King of Malaysia in 2023, she was CEO of the Malaysian Institute of Integrity, which was established in 2004 to strengthen public- and private-sector governance. Wan Suraya is well-acquainted with ensuring that organizations use public resources wisely and are accountable to the people they serve.
Oversight and accountability are her mission, and she’s being honored for that mission with the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ (ACFE) Dr. Donald R. Cressey Award. She’ll be presented with the award in July 2026 at the 37th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. The award is the ACFE’s highest honor, bestowed upon an individual for lifetime achievement in preventing and detecting fraud. Wan Suraya spoke with Fraud Magazine about her strides to improve Malaysia’s auditing processes and her plans for promoting integrity and good governance.
“My career trajectory has been quite unconventional to say the least,” Wan Suraya said in an interview with Fraud Magazine. While auditors general in Malaysia are often appointed after retiring from the civil service, Wan Suraya was selected for the role while still active. Her path to auditor general includes more than 20 years as a trade official with the Ministry of International Relations, then service as a secretary general, first for the Ministry of Entrepreneur Development and then the Ministry of Unity.
Wan Suraya eventually became the CEO of the Malaysian Institute of Integrity. “We were concerned with nurturing the spirit of integrity across the country to instill its importance in all aspects of life,” she told Fraud Magazine. She also served in diplomatic assignments in Singapore and Brussels, Belgium.
“One does not aspire to become an auditor general. One is either invited or instructed to be. It is a huge honor and a huge undertaking to be responsible for the overview of the country’s finances.” Wan Suraya told Fraud Magazine that her appointment carries significant expectation at a time when Malaysia is placing renewed emphasis on strengthening governance and public accountability.
“There’s been a sharp learning curve, but it’s also been the most satisfying trajectory of my career.”
Prime Minister Anwar has been a proponent of speedier audits to prevent the abuse of power and strengthen public accountability. In Malaysia, prime ministers often select a slogan to define their administration. Malaysia MADANI is Anwar’s slogan, and good governance is one of its pillars. “In measuring the success of a country, we must ensure that governance and management are sound. One of the key measures is our ability to conduct audits professionally and responsibly,” he said at NAD’s anniversary celebration. “When audits are weak or slow, it opens the door for leakages and abuse to continue. But when audits are carried out thoroughly and effectively, it becomes difficult for such leakages to occur.”
In 2023, reflecting the MADANI Government’s reform agenda, the Auditor General’s Report was openly debated in Parliament for the first time, marking an important step in strengthening transparency, legislative scrutiny and public accountability. This reform direction was further reinforced when the MADANI Government, led by Prime Minister Anwar, expanded NAD’s audit role by directing nearly 2,000 government companies and entities receiving public allocations or guarantees to be brought under audit scrutiny.
In February 2026, Wan Suraya presented the first Auditor General’s Report of the year to the Dewan Rakyat, Malaysia’s lower house of Parliament. The 15-volume report covered federal agencies’ financial statements and federal ministry, department and statutory body activities. It also contained 13 volumes on state ministries, departments and agencies and government-linked companies (GLCs), which are commercial enterprises partially owned by the government.
The Auditor General reported that of the 143 financial statements of federal agencies for the year 2024 submitted for audit, 128 received unmodified opinions, while 15 were issued modified opinions. For activities related to federal ministries, departments, statutory bodies and the management of GLCs, the report flagged irregularities involving revenue collection and expenditures at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. The report also revealed four companies that operated inconsistently with their established objectives and 13 Minister of Finance Incorporated (MKD) companies that failed to pay appropriate dividends.
In total, the report highlighted 273 issues, which can be viewed on the Auditor General’s Dashboard.
At the NAD’s anniversary celebration, Wan Suraya told the audience that her agency’s digital transformation was keeping with the spirit of the amendments to the Audit Act of 1957. Along with empowering her to conduct follow-up audits, the amendments expanded the auditor general’s powers, giving her the authority to audit entities of government interest, trace public funds and issue audit guidelines. The auditor general now may audit any company that receives financial guarantees from the federal government or the states.
“It’s not enough that an audit report is prepared and then later put on the shelf for everybody to admire from afar,” Wan Saraya told Fraud Magazine. She said that audit reports must provide practical solutions for their targets to follow and be visible for all to see up close. Accountability is fundamental to her role in protecting the public’s money, as well as heeding issues that have long been present but unaddressed.
“The Madani government has put forth governance as a mainstay of its policy. I’m not a politician but a practitioner, as the auditor general, and we walk the talk supported by government policies.”
Malaysia has been working to improve the public’s perception of its anti-corruption efforts. The country now scores 52 out of 100 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) — a two-point improvement over its 2024 score. The CPI is the most widely used global corruption ranking in the world, measuring how experts and businesspeople consider the level of corruption in governments around the world. A country’s score is the perceived level of public-sector corruption on a scale of 0 to 100, where a score of 0 is highly corrupt and a score of 100 is “very clean.” A country’s rank is its position relative to other countries on the index. Malaysia currently ranks 54 out of 182 countries.
Reforming Malaysia’s audits is central to reforming perceptions. “The 1MDB scandal fundamentally required us to revisit how we’ve done audits in the past,” Wan Suraya told Fraud Magazine. “It also heightened the public’s demands on us to ensure a high level of accountability. What we emphasize now is ensuring that all contractual obligations are reviewed in-depth. We’re not looking at it from purely an accounting perspective; we’re also looking at it from a legal perspective and an engineering perspective, so if a contract is signed, then everybody is accountable.” Wan Suraya has a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Sheffield in the U.K. and received professional training at London’s Lincoln Inn.
She stresses that beyond identifying issues in audit reports, auditors must also prioritize resolving issues. She strives to bring together all parties in an audit to find solutions, note serious irregularities and fully address issues. Wan Suraya said this aspect has been one of her department’s main achievements, especially with the Auditor General’s Dashboard incorporating issues highlighted in reports and confirming for the public that organizations have followed up on those issues.
By 2023, NAD was responding to an increasingly complex governance and risk environment that required continual adaptation of public-sector auditing. Under Wan Suraya’s leadership, the department accelerated ongoing efforts to strengthen its capabilities, modernize audit practices and equip auditors to respond more effectively to emerging risks. Drawing on her experience across several areas of the public service, Wan Suraya observed that governments often find themselves responding to increasingly sophisticated financial crimes and governance challenges. “Fighting increasingly complex modern financial crimes requires auditors to understand the businesses and systems they are auditing,” she told Fraud Magazine.
I have a young team and a team that’s young at heart, like me. We are trying to utilize whatever resources that we have, while at the same time navigating an ever-more complex situation.
To support this shift, the department has expanded professional development programs that equip auditors with a deeper understanding of financial crime risks, industry practices and emerging technologies. “With auditing, you look at many areas. And every time you come into an audit, you must understand how those areas work, and how this system or industry works,” she said. Recognizing that the public-sector risk landscape continues to evolve, the department has progressively enhanced its audit methodologies to ensure that they remain effective in identifying increasingly sophisticated governance and fraud risks.
Wan Suraya described to Fraud Magazine how past institutional complacency and delays in auditor follow-ups were old habits that she and her team are working to forego. Many issues noted in previous audit reports hadn’t been adequately resolved. The amended Audit Act of 1957, along with the Audit Bill 2024, ensures that auditors have a mandate to complete follow-up audits to resolve past issues.
The auditing department tracks progress on reported issues with a color system resembling traffic lights. An issue in progress is marked yellow. For an issue to be marked green, the appropriate parties must prove that they’ve taken the necessary correction measures outlined in their audit report. This system is available for public viewing on the Auditor General’s Dashboard.
After she spoke at the 2025 ACFE Fraud Conference Asia-Pacific, held in Kuala Lumpur, the dashboard received high praise for its openness that allows the public to track progress and see what actions have been taken to resolve issues. “And because of that, ‘it’s really shaken the system,’ as the prime minister would say,” Wan Suraya would later tell Fraud Magazine. “The Auditor General’s Dashboard has shaken the overall structure because everybody is now accountable to update what has been done after the audit report has been published. Our report is not only presented to Parliament, but it’s also debated. When it’s debated, everything is open for scrutiny.”
Auditees and heads of departments must be ready to answer to Parliament and to the public regarding the findings in the audit report. Once an issue is debated in Parliament, the respective ministries must act on the findings and update their corrective measures, which holds public officials accountable not only to the audit department, but to the public as well. “That brings the level of governance to a much higher level,” she told Fraud Magazine. “With the level of scrutiny higher than ever, it’s put everybody on their toes to make sure they report what they do to follow up on an issue once it’s in the report.”
Necessary to increasing scrutiny and follow-up measures is navigating advanced technology. Wan Suraya told Fraud Magazine it’s imperative for her team to be aligned with the audit department’s digitalization initiative. “When I came in [as auditor general], I really wanted to make sure that everybody understood it, and everybody is on board,” she said. “By next year, we will be fully digital from all levels of audit, from the practice of audit itself to when we present our reports.” With AI, they’ve audited almost 2,000 government companies, a development Wan Suraya said they will continue every year.
The NAD considers fraud in all its audits. According to Wan Suraya, this includes looking at all levels of an organization to see how things are done and ensure that auditors can detect wrongdoing in all its forms. Once they identify new frauds, they incorporate them into their audit practice to better detect them in the future.
“I have a young team and a team that’s young at heart, like me. We are trying to utilize whatever resources that we have, while at the same time navigating an ever-more complex situation,” she told Fraud Magazine.
She incorporates her fundamental principles into due diligence practices. “I have a favorite line, ‘In God, we trust,’ or in our case, ‘In Allah, we trust.’ We trust only Allah; all others we will audit. It’s always an element of professional skepticism.” According to Wan Suraya, auditors must approach every audit with skepticism, always seeking verification. They must also ensure that management is held accountable for the information they provide. This allows them to know everything that needs to be done to correct an issue and be fully accountable in how they protect and utilize public funds.
“Audit is the first line of defense for public money,” she told Fraud Magazine. “If auditors don’t do the work, if we don’t question, if we don’t interrogate or delve further into an issue, who else will do it?” She emphasizes this philosophy to her auditing officers, telling them they have a higher mandate to do these things. She encourages them to do their job and be accountable to God and to the public. “That’s a high mandate and something that puts us all on our toes to make sure that we’re looking at the totality of an audit and using professional skepticism.”
In February 2026, the NAD introduced new auditing guidelines to increase its scope in tracking companies that receive public funds. The “Follow the Public Money Audit” approach enables the department to audit companies the Minister of Finance deems necessary to examine.
“The ‘Follow the Public Money Audit’ allows us to trace public funds wherever they go,” Wan Suraya told Fraud Magazine. “I used to say, ‘If a penny falls under the table and rolls down the floor, you can follow it where it goes.’ If they have access to public funds, we can knock on the door and say, ‘OK, I’m just coming in, but I want to see how you spend public funds.’”
Drawing on global best practices, Wan Suraya has sought to adapt these methods to ensure that everyone shares accountability. Anyone who has access to public funds, nongovernmental organizations or state-owned companies alike, is under the purview of NAD’s review of spending records.
To boost accountability, the department now targets “serious irregularities” under the amended Audit Act 1957. Unaddressed mistakes often escalate into severe financial exposures. The new framework ensures swift correction, preventing past failures from repeating and turning audit insights into enforceable governance.
“There is an element of urgency to it because this is for the benefit of the public,” she said to Fraud Magazine. “Things won’t change overnight, but if we can create a ripple and make sure that people are aware and are accountable, we will continue to adapt and evolve to keep on par with whatever is out there.”
Recognizing that fraud risks and governance challenges continue to evolve, the NAD has strengthened its institutional capabilities through continual professional development and strategic collaboration. The department works closely with professional bodies, technical agencies and other public institutions to ensure its auditors remain abreast of emerging risks, industry practices and developments in fraud detection. According to Wan Suraya, effective auditing requires more than technical accounting knowledge — it demands a sound understanding of the industries, systems and business environments being audited.
To support this approach, the department has established specialized forensic and AI capabilities, all while continuing to strengthen professional competencies across its workforce, including increasing the number of officers who hold internationally recognized professional certifications such as the Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) credential. These initiatives reflect the NAD’s commitment to equipping auditors with the expertise needed to respond to increasingly sophisticated governance and financial risks.
Capacity building remains a key pillar of the department’s transformation agenda. Through its Audit Academy, certified by the Asian Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI), the NAD provides training not only for its own officers but also for auditors from other Supreme Audit Institutions across the region. Participants from countries including Palestine, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India have benefited from these programs, reinforcing Malaysia's growing contribution to professional development within the international public audit community.
The department also continues to expand its technical capabilities through collaboration with specialist agencies. Working together with the Malaysian Space Agency (MYSA), auditors are now able to incorporate satellite imagery into selected audits where appropriate, providing an additional source of independent evidence to verify the implementation and progress of public projects. “It’s about always learning and adapting and understanding what's out there, and making sure that we have access,” Wan Suraya said.
The NAD has also enhanced its audit methodologies to provide greater scrutiny over the management of public funds, particularly in areas involving complex procurement arrangements and government-funded programs. By adopting a more risk-based approach, auditors are better equipped to identify emerging issues, trace the utilization of public funds and recommend timely corrective action where necessary.
You have to be virtuous and move beyond slogans. It’s not enough to say you will do something, but that you follow through. People want to know that you’re more than talk, and that things are being done.
For Wan Suraya, the objective is not merely to identify weaknesses but to ensure that audit findings lead to meaningful improvements. “We don’t finish an audit and never come back again,” she told Fraud Magazine. The Department’s strengthened follow-up audit function, together with the Auditor General’s Dashboard, enables progress on audit recommendations to be monitored transparently, reinforcing accountability among auditees and encouraging timely implementation of corrective measures.
These reforms have produced tangible outcomes. Audit findings have contributed to the recovery of public funds, strengthened financial management practices and encouraged greater attention to the timely implementation of audit recommendations. More importantly, they have reinforced a culture in which audit findings are viewed not as the conclusion of the audit process, but as the beginning of continuous improvement.
Her experience as CEO of the Malaysian Institute of Integrity continues to shape Wan Suraya’s philosophy of public audits. For her, integrity is not simply an aspiration but the foundation upon which effective governance, accountability and public trust are built.
“What I learned from being the CEO of the institute is that you can’t run away from integrity. If you don’t have integrity, you can’t talk from the highest standpoint. It is about sharpening our convictions. You have to be virtuous and move beyond slogans. It’s not enough to say you will do something, but that you follow through. People want to know that you’re more than talk, and that things are being done.”
As auditor general, Wan Suraya believes public audits should be viewed as an essential part of good governance rather than an occasional exercise in compliance. Audit findings should lead to meaningful corrective action, strengthen public confidence and support better stewardship of public resources.
“So get ready for it, be prepared and make sure that what you do is right. We will take note.”
Wan Suraya told Fraud Magazine that she hopes Malaysia’s governance agenda will continue to grow and deliver lasting impact. This vision is also reflected internationally, with NAD chairing the INTOSAI Working Group on Follow-Up Audit (WGFA), one of INTOSAI’s largest working groups, comprising audit institutions from 60 countries. Under Malaysia’s leadership, the WGFA is developing a Compendium of Good Practices on Follow-Up Audit, a collection of international practices that will help strengthen audit institutions around the world. The initiative underscores the importance of turning audit recommendations into concrete follow-up actions and meaningful governance improvements.
“When we do things, we are not just governed by our own domestic agenda. We also want to add value to the rest of the world by playing a more active role in Asia.”
As the NAD marks its 120th anniversary, Wan Suraya believes its greatest legacy will not be measured by the number of audits completed or reports produced, but by the improvements those audits inspire — in institutions, in governance and ultimately in the lives of the people they serve.
Ultimately, the true measure of public audit is not the number of reports produced, but the confidence it builds in public institutions and the trust it inspires among citizens.
Anna Brahce, CFE, is assistant editor of Fraud Magazine. Contact her at abrahce@ACFE.com.
Jennifer Liebman, CFE, is editor in chief of Fraud Magazine. Contact her at jliebman@ACFE.com.
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