RAP Completion Audit Checklist (IFC PS-5 / World Bank ESS-5)
A free completion audit checklist for a Resettlement Action Plan — 15 test areas, the evidence required for each, and the sampling logic an independent auditor actually applies.
15 test areas · evidence required · sampling note · standard reference
The document almost nobody publishes
Search for a RAP template and you will find census forms, entitlement matrices and budget structures — every artefact from the planning stage of a resettlement, and almost nothing from the stage where a project's record is actually tested. That gap is not an accident. The people who write about completion audits are usually the auditors, and their checklists live inside consulting firms rather than on the open web.
This one is built from the same standards an external auditor applies — IFC PS-5, its Guidance Note, and World Bank ESS-5 — and from the pattern of findings that recurs across audited projects documented in the accountability-mechanism record. It is the checklist to run against your own file before someone external runs it for you.
Sampling, not appraisal
An auditor does not read a programme and form a view of its quality. They draw a sample of households and test each one against the record: what the instrument entitled them to, what the records say they received, and what the household itself says happened. Discrepancies between the three are the audit's raw material.
This produces a finding pattern project teams often experience as unfair. A programme that treated most households well but cannot produce records for the sampled ones fails. A programme with mediocre substance and complete records passes more comfortably. The fifteen areas in the checklist are what a sample is tested against — run it against your own file before the auditor's sample finds the gap first.
The finding that decides everything upstream of it
If the socioeconomic baseline recorded assets rather than income sources, no audit — however well the rest of the file is kept — can establish whether livelihoods were restored, because the pre-project state was never measured in a form that supports comparison. That defect is fixed years before the audit happens, by people who will not be present for it. Everything else in this checklist can be corrected retrospectively with enough effort. This one cannot.
Questions
- What does a RAP completion audit actually check?
- Fifteen areas: completeness of the affected-person list, eligibility determinations, cut-off date disclosure, replacement-cost valuation, the statutory-to-standard gap, timing of payment against displacement, delivery of payment to the named person, vulnerability screening and assistance, grievance handling, livelihood restoration, host-community impacts, consultation and disclosure evidence, revision history, cultural heritage treatment, and the independence of the audit itself.
- Who should conduct a completion audit?
- A party with no stake in the finding and no role in the original implementation. Self-assessment by the implementing team is not independent regardless of professional integrity, because the reporting party's continued engagement or reputation depends on the answer being favourable. IFC PS-5 and World Bank ESS-5 both expect an external audit where impacts are significant.
- What is the single most common finding?
- Depreciation deducted from a structure valuation. Full replacement cost means the cost to rebuild new, at current prices, with no deduction for the age or condition of what was lost. It is standard practice in ordinary valuation and is exactly what the resettlement standard prohibits — which is why it recurs across almost every audited project.
- Can a project pass on substance and fail on evidence?
- Yes, and this is the pattern that surprises project teams most. An auditor samples cases and tests the record behind each one. A programme that delivered a measure well but cannot evidence it is, for audit purposes, indistinguishable from one that did not deliver it at all. The finding records an inability to demonstrate compliance regardless of what actually happened in the field.
- When should a project start preparing for this audit?
- At design, not at the point the audit is scheduled. Everything an audit requires — individuated records, a baseline capable of supporting comparison, contemporaneous evidence — must exist before the audit begins and cannot be created afterwards. A project that asks at design stage what the audit will require makes different decisions about census instruments and record systems than one that considers it only when the audit is imminent.
Read before you use it
The software behind this
SmartLARMS keeps this as a live record, not a spreadsheet
A template is a starting point. The version that survives a completion audit is one where every change is attributed to a person and a date, and where the numbers reconcile to what was actually paid.