The watchdog of Parliament: the centenary of the legislative audit

Abstract

Abstract. August 1, 1978, marks the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the office of the Auditor General of Canada. This article traces the development of the concept of the legislative audit from the time of its first application in Canada to the present day. The first legislation, modelled on the United Kingdom Exchequer and Audit Departments Act of 1866 and virtually unchanged in substance from 1878 to 1931, vested in the Auditor General the dual functions of comptroller of issue and auditor of the public accounts, with the emphasis on legality and conformity with appropriation requirements. In 1931 responsibility for issue control was removed from the Audit Office and transferred to a newly created executive officer, the Comptroller of the Treasury, who assumed responsibility for a pre‐audit of expenditures, leaving the Auditor General his post‐audit functions. The article describes the transfer in 1969 of responsibility for pre‐audit from the Comptroller of the Treasury to departments in response to the recommendations of the Glassco Royal Commission on Government Organization; the development of the ‘value for money’ concept by the Independent Review Committee on the Office of the Auditor General of Canada; and the embodiment in legislation in the 1975 Auditor General Act of the ‘value for money’ concept in which the audit emphasis is primarily on economy, efficiency and effectiveness.

From Change to Stability: An Evaluation of Change and Performance at Canada's Office of the Auditor General

“…between the OAG and Parliament, as the government attempted to limit the OAG from discussing sensitive matters in the public forum of Parliament, and the opposition from gaining political ammunition from OAG reports. Such a motive has repeatedly surfaced throughout the OAG's history (Ward 1951, Balls 1978, Sinclair 1979, Henderson 1984). Yet regardless of the cause behind the recent drop in interaction, if the fluctuations in the data set are themselves the trend, these low levels of interaction -in the absence of an unknown, new structural cause -will likely increase in subsequent years.…”