Bibliometric Framing of Research Trends Regarding Public Sector Auditing to Fight Corruption and Prevent Fraud

Abstract

Combating corruption is an important objective of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group, with the aim of helping public institutions to act in the interest of citizens. To ensure this objective is met, the spending of public money is controlled by the supreme audit institutions of each country. The objective of this paper is to identify trends in and approaches to the field of auditing in the public sector to combat corruption and prevent fraud. To achieve the proposed objective, a bibliometric analysis of papers published in the journals indexed in Web of Science Clarivate Analytics for the period 2003–2022 was carried out; selection criteria was based on instances of the keywords “public audit fraud”, “supreme institution”, and “fraud” appearing in a sample of 528 articles. The results showed that there was a research interest in this field, with the trend being more pronounced since 2017. The main topics addressed were those related to the performance audit and the fight against corruption, and the most relevant studies were conducted on samples from Nordic European countries. Thus, it is confirmed that the external audit in public sector is an important factor in combating the phenomenon of corruption in the public sector, both by detecting fraud and by offering recommendations aimed at making the activity of this sector more efficient.