The European Commission recently adopted and transmitted to the European Parliament and Council a Delegated Regulation with rules on independent audits to assess compliance of Very Large Online Platforms and Very Large Online Search Engines with the Digital Services Act (DSA). 

Audits represent an important accountability tool and are part of the DSA's various transparency requirements. The DSA requires that the Delegated Regulation set out the steps the designated services must apply to verify the capabilities and independence of their auditors who will use templates to produce the independent audits. Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines are expected to use templates to produce their implementation reports. Mandatory templates are provided to ensure comparability between the reports from different services. With this new process, the audit reports are transmitted within three months from the time that the audit implementation report is completed.