绩效审计与公共管理改革

绩效审计与公共管理改革内容摘要：

quangos, local authorities, and other kinds of public body. SAIs, by contrast, are single anizations, seldom employing more than a few hundred staff. Thus, changes in what auditors do simply do not appear to be as important or newsworthy as changes that affect the work of tens or hundreds of thousands of public officials, and which may impact directly on citizens’ use of public services. Even if the above considerations go some way towards explaining the relative lack of media and scholarly attention given to the development of performance audit, that does not mean that such activities are insignificant. On the contrary— and as we shall showperformance audit has bee the largest single activity for some SAIs and an important part of the work of all the SAIs in this study. This is a relatively recent development. Although the definition of performance audit is less than straightforward, it is probably accurate to say that, allowing for some earlier, partial precedents, its emergence as a distinct and mainstream activity dates mainly from the late 1970s and 1980s. Thus, over the last two decades, a number of SAIs have invested a considerable proportion of their resources in developing a relatively new area of activity, one that is directly focused on those issues of performance that have themselves bee such a central focus of concern for modern governments. While governments have declared themselves to be intensely concerned with the ‘three Es’ (economy, efficiency, and effectiveness) at the same time as SAIs have been developing performance audit as a way of investigating those same three Es, the connection between these two lines of activity has not been as straightforward as might at first appear. Of course, some impacts are fairly obvious. For example, a recent UK National Audit Office handbook acknowledges that performance audit has had to respond to the fact that: ‘Two thirds of government business is now carried out by agencies, outputs and delivery are more important than inputs, and there is much greater involvement of the private sector in the delivery of publicly funded programs’. This is an example of a direct influence, running from public management reform to performance audit. However, the whole picture is considerably more plicated, with direct and indirect influences running in both directions. Our aim has therefore been to study the practice of performance audit and relate it to contemporary developments in public management. We have investigated the ‘state of the art’ of performance audit and explored its links with the processes of management reform. In empirical terms, we have had twin foci. First, we have gathered material about public management reform in each country— this describes the context in which SAIs have developed performance audit. Much of this has necessarily been secondary data, though some of it derives from other recent work by members of our team. Second, in relation to the performance audit side of the relationship, we have conducted extensive primary research. Our main focus has been on the performance audit report and on the process that leads up to that report. Some other recent work, though conceptually sophisticated, has been limited by its reliance on a more general type of evidence. We would contend that the acid test of what performance audit ’is’ ,or is capable of, may lie more in the bedrock of individual audits than in the superstr。