Honest, Competent Government: The Promise of Performance Auditing

Trust in government is vital to the success of any community/society. Performance auditing can help increase citizens’ trust by promoting honest, competent government.

Honest, Competent Government: The Promise of Performance Auditing considers the key concepts underlying the various standards, tools, strategies, and practices of effective government. The report was sponsored by the Internal Audit Foundation as part of its commitment to strengthen government auditing globally. 

Comprehensive research identified the following real-world challenges most frequently mentioned by government auditors: 

• Achieving the desired level of audit impact
• Recruiting and retaining adequate numbers of skilled staff
• Managing the perceived tension between accountability and performance improvement
• Selecting audit topics that matter and writing timely and clear audit reports
• Developing better audit approaches and methods 

The new profession of government performance auditing should be based on the idea that the point of the work is to serve the citizens. The problems we face are daunting-global warming, terrorism, providing adequate clean water, and controlling the spread of infectious disease.

All of us—elected officials, public administrators, newspaper editors, radio talk show hosts, business people, and civic leaders—need to care about building stronger, more effective governments and government audit agencies.