The ‘front stage’ of substance auditing: A study of how substance auditing is presented in performance audit reports

Abstract

Performance audit is a practice with a potentially high degree of democratic and political relevance. Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) have the authority to determine whether the undertakings in central government ‘are working’; therefore, SAIs tend to be regarded as important guardians of transparency and ‘good’ public sector performance. For this purpose, audits of ‘substance’ are regarded as crucial by both the research community and the INTOSAI. Still, the literature on performance audit concludes that substance audits are rare, although they do exist. One explanation for this is that substance auditing can be a risky endeavour for the auditors, since the lack of generic accounting standards for ‘good’ public sector performance makes the performance audit reports vulnerable to criticism. The aim of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of substance auditing by detailing the ways in which such audits are presented in performance audit reports. Thus, the paper focuses its analysis on the ‘front stage’ of substance auditing and finds that the auditors rarely choose to stand on the front stage alone. Instead, they regularly support their authority by relying on other authorities, and when such authorities are lacking, the auditors are reluctant to present judgements in terms of ‘good’ (or poor) performance. In such cases, this paper suggests that the democratic relevance of the audits can be questioned.

Public sector audit in contemporary society: A short review and introduction

“…Svärdsten Nymans () analysed the presentation of substance audits in 28 performance audit reports conducted by the Swedish National Audit Office (SNAO) in the period 2003‐2010. Substance audits, contrary to systems audits, analyse the economy, efficiency or effectiveness of public services or policies.…”

Exploring past, present and future trends in public sector auditing research: a literature review

“…In the context of NPG, some studies (Pollitt, 2006;Radcliffe, 2011;Reichborn-Kjennerud, 2013;Morin, 2016;Reichborn-Kjennerud, 2014b;Rosa and Morote, 2016;Gårseth-Nesbakk and Kuruppu, 2018;Svärdsten, 2019) discuss how the results of performance audit activities are communicated. Several studies undertaken since 2007 focused on external government entities, a feature of NPG (Pollock and Price, 2008;English et al, 2010).…”

Assessment of Audit Activities in the Public Administration with a Focus on the Types of Audits : Practice in the Public Sector of the V4 Countries

“…An SAi can ensure that transparency is safeguarded and the government operates in a sound manner from its ability to ascertain whether government entities are functioning properly. in this respect, both iNtOSAi and research institutions consider public administration audits to be essential (Svardsten, 2019). The current trend in performance audits is for the auditors to try involving audited entities, the media and parliamentary representatives more in the performance of the audit, while maintaining their audit powers.…”