Hungary introduced the internal control system during the accession process to the European Union. In the second half of the 2000Õs the Hungarian State Audit Office (SAO) adopted the concept of organizational integrity and integrity management from its Dutch partner organization within the framework of a Twining Light Project. At the beginning of the 2010Õs the SAO had a priority project financed by the European Social Fund to disseminate the received and adapted new concepts. In the first half of the 2010Õs the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice had another priority project (financed by the same fund) in which the government introduced the integrity management system in the public administration organizations. The main references and the basis of the new system were the recommendations of the SAO and the guideline of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development titled ÔTowards a Sound Integrity FrameworkÕ.
The three main pillars of the Hungarian version of the integrity management system are the following ones: the integrity development cycle, the integrity advisor and the examination process of events that violate the organizational integrity. The one year cycle of the integrity development includes: the annual analysis of corruption and integrity risks within the organization, creating an action plan for managing the identified risks and elaborating an integrity report in the end of each year. The integrity advisor has a two-fold role in the public administration. In the one hand he or she have to enjoy the confidence of the head of the organization and in other hand of the staff. It is the main task of an integrity advisor to help the leader to strengthen the integrity of the organization.
The main challenge of the integrity advisors were to achieve the recognition within the organization, and to prepare methodically correct risk analysis. The main challenge in the operation of the internal control system was the lack of the professional operative coordination and the widespread misunderstanding of the scope and the nature of the system. In Hungarian the phrases of which translate the internal control and the internal audit seems to be synonyms. Both of them mean Ôinternal checkÕ. Because of this the operative internal control tasks frequently were identified as internal audit tasks. In the most of the cases the internal auditors avoid to undertake these tasks, but it resulted that finally the economic director got them, and the internal control systems were operated only by the economic units.