Suchergebnisse

The audit expectations gap has received considerable publicity world-wide, particularly in the recent global financial crisis. Public sector auditing is not exempt in this respect, and is no more so than in the area of performance auditing. How much do audit reports really tell us about the value delivered by government programmes? Is there sufficiently shared understanding and perceptions of performance auditing and the value it provides?

The audit expectations gap has received considerable publicity world-wide, particularly in the recent global financial crisis. Public sector auditing is not exempt in this respect, and is no more so than in the area of performance auditing. How much do audit reports really tell us about the value delivered by government programmes? Is there sufficiently shared understanding and perceptions of performance auditing and the value it provides?

The tools of integrity institutions, including performance auditing (PA), are attracting growing research interest. Amidst this interest, there is ongoing debate about the definition of PA. This article adopts a new definitional framework to characterise and investigate the PA space, which is the conceptual space in which PA takes place. The article then uses a case study from Australia to consider four integrity institutions that, after a process of convergence, now occupy that space. The article explores the implications that arise when integrity institutions cohabit the PA space. It concludes that the space is both crowded and contested, and that this has implications for society, government agencies and the integrity institutions themselves. Adapted from the source document.

The tools of integrity institutions, including performance auditing (PA), are attracting growing research interest. Amidst this interest, there is ongoing debate about the definition of PA. This article adopts a new definitional framework to characterise and investigate the PA space, which is the conceptual space in which PA takes place. The article then uses a case study from Australia to consider four integrity institutions that, after a process of convergence, now occupy that space. The article explores the implications that arise when integrity institutions cohabit the PA space. It concludes that the space is both crowded and contested, and that this has implications for society, government agencies and the integrity institutions themselves. Adapted from the source document.

In this decade we have witnessed in the Australian public sector
tremendous pressures for change in the name of accountability and
efficiency. Changes have occurred in public sector management and in
public sector accounting. Techniques such as programme budgeting,
financial management initiatives, enhanced annual reporting and
performance audits have all been promoted. These changes have led to a
"new" accounting for the public sector. Performance auditing
is compared at the commonwealth and the state level, and a study is
provided of how a change in accounting can affect the organisation, in a
social and political context. Differences between performance auditing
and traditional auditing are illustrated and then assessed within a
framework of accountability.

The aim of this thesis is to problematize how and under what conditions organizational performance is constituted in the practices of performance auditing and accounting. Organizational performance disclosure is a world-wide phenomenon for enabling accountability relationships in large organizations regardless of the societal sector they operate in. In constitutive accounting literature, there is a well-established notion that accounting and performance auditing enable "government at a distance" by representing organizational actions and results of those actions, i.e. by constituting performance. Accounting and performance auditing have been regarded as "technologies of government" that make government from spatial and temporal distances possible by linking political and programmatic ambitions, i.e., the will of a superior, to everyday organizational conduct. However, whereas many previous studies of accounting and performance auditing as technologies of government focus on the discourses over the technologies of accounting and performance auditing, this thesis focuses its analysis on the operationalization of these technologies in local organizational settings. By studying the constitution of performance in the practices of accounting and performance auditing this thesis contributes by problematizing that which supposedly makes government at a distance possible. The thesis is based on two case studies of performance audit and two case studies of performance reporting. On the basis of these papers, the thesis studies the constitution of performance in performance auditing and accounting. Whereas the constitution of performance may seem stable and unproblematic at the level of discourse, this thesis suggests that constituting performance is a complex process of social construction that requires significant organizational efforts and that the ability of accounting and performance auditing to connect political and programmatic ambitions to daily organizational conduct cannot be taken for granted. The thesis suggest that once we acknowledge that performance is a socially constructed representation of organizational actions and begin to pay attention to how performance is constituted in local organizational settings, we can find new ways of addressing the ongoing challenge of constituting performance in accounting and performance auditing and increase our understanding about the ability of these practices to enable government at a distance. ; At the time of doctoral defence the following papers were unoublished and had a status as follows: Paper nr. 2: Manuscript; Paper nr. 3: Manuscript; Paper nr. 4: Manuscript