Abstract
The complexity of the public sector generated by the mobilisation and use of significant financial resources, national cultural factors, the heterogeneity of the provision of public services, the numerous interested parties, the increasing demand for the quality of public services, the information asymmetry, require an actor to provide credible assurance regarding the proper management of public financial resources. In this context, performance audits are the link between public sector entities and stakeholders. The research has two components: the first component analyzes the degree of harmonization of the regulations specific to the performance audit in Romania with the International Standards of Supreme Audit Institutions (ISSAI); the second component analyses the degree of transparency of performance audit information by the SAIs of the EU Member States, through their official websites. In this regard, we have resorted to an in-depth longitudinal study, content analysis and disclosure index. The research results highlighted that the Romanian SAI has adopted in its normative framework the foremost ISSAI provisions on performance audit and the harmonization degree has systematically improved correlative with the regulatory revisions. The degree of disclosure for performance audit-specific information by the EU member state SAIs is high.
Highlights
Based on the criteria established in previous research papers, it can be argued that we conduct a formal harmonization study, as we considered only convergence between Romanian legal provisions in performance auditing and International Standards of Supreme Audit Institutions (ISSAI) and not the actual good practices in filling in the performance audit reports [38]
The research employed a longitudinal study of the Romanian regulatory framework compared to the latest ISSAI 300 and ISSAI 3000 revisions as published on the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI)
For a more in-depth harmonization analysis, we firstly addressed eight ISSAI 300 criteria regarding the performance audit framework and elements, as presented in Table 2, where the Romanian normative framework convergence score was initially 0.7125, subsequently improving to 0.8000 starting in 2011
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Our research approach is based on the importance of public sector performance from the stakeholders’ perspective. The supreme audit institutions (SAIs) through their performance auditing, deliver to stakeholders a credible assurance on the proper management of public resources. SAIs were subject to many research papers during the last decades due to their importance in guaranteeing the correctitude of public money spending. The area of research varies from involvement in diminishing corruption levels [1,2,3], to the evaluation of the economic impact of SAIs [4] and to the transparency [5] and communication with the stakeholders (especially citizens) through social media [6]
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