Eyes Wide Shut? The Politics of Autonomous Audit Agencies in Emerging Economies

Santiso, Carlos

doi:10.2139/ssrn.982663

Cited by 12 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…e existing literature identi es three types of audit procedures performed by government audit organizations; they are (i) nancial: related to the reliability of the nancial statements; (ii) legality: related to compliance with laws; and (iii) performance or operational: related to the e ciency of the public resources usage (Santiso, 2007).…”

Section: Literature Of Audit Quality In Governmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The diversity of the Brazilian regional Audit Courts on government auditing

Lino

Aquino

2017

Rev. contab. finanç.

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Currently, the 33 regional audit courts are responsible to monitor the public nancial management cycle for states and municipalities and to judge the compliance of governors' acts to the laws regarding procurement and civil servants' employment from more than 20,000 governmental entities under their jurisdiction. is article aims to analyze the diversity of internal con guration of these regional audit courts and to discuss the potential associations with the nancial auditing quality their teams usually run. We conducted interviews with external auditors and IT directors from 18 courts, followed by triangulation to o cial documents from the audit courts, such as audit manuals and activities reports. e audit quality drivers were identi ed within the governmental auditing literature, supporting the evidences collected by the interviews content analysis. Despite all regional auditing bodies in Brazil were based on the Napoleonic model, the analysis indicates the identi ed con gurations vary according to the team's organization and size, auditor rotation and use of data reporting systems. e discussion shows that dissimilarities on the courts' con gurations, as they are responsible to audit a speci c country area, will contribute to a di erent coercion level on scal and accounting issues to state and municipalities, due a combination of characteristics which could mitigate or improve the audit quality. is paper additionally suggests some precautions, based on the organization alignment literature, for the use of proxies to control audit quality e ects in the public nance studies in Brazil.

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Section: Literature Of Audit Quality In Governmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The diversity of the Brazilian regional Audit Courts on government auditing

Lino

Aquino

2017

Rev. contab. finanç.

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“…External auditing in Argentina is particularly deficient, as shown in the index of institutional effectiveness we developed elsewhere (Santiso, 2006b(Santiso, , 2007b(Santiso, , 2007c. The indicator assesses AAAs' effectiveness along four performance indicators measuring the independence of audit agencies, the credibility of auditing findings, the timeliness of audit reports and the enforcement of audit rulings (Santiso, 2006b(Santiso, , 2007b(Santiso, , 2007c.…”

Section: Assessing External Auditingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The indicator assesses AAAs' effectiveness along four performance indicators measuring the independence of audit agencies, the credibility of auditing findings, the timeliness of audit reports and the enforcement of audit rulings (Santiso, 2006b(Santiso, , 2007b(Santiso, , 2007c. Table 1 and 4 Institutional arrangement for external auditing of public finances are particularly deficient at the sub-national level.…”

Section: Assessing External Auditingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What roles AAAs actually play in financial oversight depends on their structure and processes, as well as their resource endowments and legal powers. Standard typologies classify them according to their institutional features and include three ideal types: the monocratic model, the court model and the board or collegiate model (Allen and Tommasi, 2001;Stapenhurst and Titsworth, 2001;Santiso, 2007bSantiso, , 2007c). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The quasi-judicial features and functions of the court model privilege legal and financial compliance over performance auditing. The links with the legislature are limited; yet those with the judiciary are also ambiguous (Santiso, 2007b(Santiso, , 2007c). The board model is an institutional hybrid.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Eyes wide shut? Reforming and defusing checks and balances in Argentina

Santiso

2007

Public Admin & Development

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SUMMARYHow effective are autonomous audit agencies (AAAs) in curbing corruption and improving fiscal governance in emerging economies? AAAs are autonomous oversight agencies tasked with scrutinising government finances. However, they are not as effective as they could or should be, partly because of the political constraints they face and the political economy context in which they are embedded. This article assesses the performance and trajectory of the Argentine AAA. It suggests that AAAs can have only a limited impact when formal fiscal institutions are undermined by informal practices and undercut by adverse political incentives. It further highlights the limits of radical reform strategies based on the import of exogenous institutional models. This research has important research and policy implications for the reform and strengthening of AAAs in developing countries.

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Fiscal data in text: Information extraction from audit reports using Natural Language Processing

Beltran

2023

Data & Policy

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Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) are touted as an integral component to anticorruption efforts in developing nations. SAIs review governmental budgets and report fiscal discrepancies in publicly available audit reports. These documents contain valuable information on budgetary discrepancies, missing resources, or may even report fraud and corruption. Existing research on anticorruption efforts relies on information published by national-level SAIs while mostly ignoring audits from subnational SAIs because their information is not published in accessible formats. I collect publicly available audit reports published by a subnational SAI in Mexico, the Auditoria Superior del Estado de Sinaloa, and build a pipeline for extracting the monetary value of discrepancies detected in municipal budgets. I systematically convert scanned documents into machine-readable text using optical character recognition, and I then train a classification model to identify paragraphs with relevant information. From the relevant paragraphs, I extract the monetary values of budgetary discrepancies by developing a named entity recognizer that automates the identification of this information. In this paper, I explain the steps for building the pipeline and detail the procedures for replicating it in different contexts. The resulting dataset contains the official amounts of discrepancies in municipal budgets for the state of Sinaloa. This information is useful to anticorruption policymakers because it quantifies discrepancies in municipal spending potentially motivating reforms that mitigate misappropriation. Although I focus on a single state in Mexico, this method can be extended to any context where audit reports are publicly available.

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Eyes Wide Shut? The Politics of Autonomous Audit Agencies in Emerging Economies

Cited by 12 publications

References 54 publications

The diversity of the Brazilian regional Audit Courts on government auditing

The diversity of the Brazilian regional Audit Courts on government auditing

Eyes wide shut? Reforming and defusing checks and balances in Argentina

Fiscal data in text: Information extraction from audit reports using Natural Language Processing

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