American Government Performance Auditing And The Reference For China

The purposes of the government’s performance auditing are to maximize the values of public services, to pursue the building of a democratic and responsible government. The pursue is the core of accountability. It is the reason why performance auditing had became a part of modern government’s development, as well as the practice of new public management theories. More than 85% of government audits are performance auditings in Western countries, especially in the American government. Comparing to the traditional financial audits, the American government’s audits features the ability to provide strong evidence and foresight information. The performance auditing significantly affects the American Congress, and acts as the main method to achieve maximum efficiency. The auditing experiences should be studied and referenced by our country.America’s broad application of performance auditing not only originated from its independence nature and innovation, but also from American government’s favorable policies and environment. For example, its three different branches of government political systems, an independent, parliamentarian auditing management model, well-established justice system, sound media supervision, citizen equality and etc. These aspects constraint our government’s auditing system’s development. They are needed as our country becomes more adaptable to the international economic and political development. They are also the basis to our transformation from the traditional management to a more democratic and scientific management, including the performance control strategies’ formulation and execution, performance evaluation system’s establishment and maintenance, government evaluations’supervision, information disclosure, e-government’s promotion, and etc.Advocating the idea of performance management is an important part as our country establishes the responsible government, and a prerequisite of a more effective audit. In order to achieve performance management, there must be a nation-wide government performance management framework and correction system. We must be able to guarantee the auditing department’s independence from other parts of the government. Disclosure of information and the involvement of the citizen and media is a boost to the further development of the performance auditing. In order to achieve the goals in the Nation’s Auditing Office’s Strategic Plan of the year 2008-2012, we must establish a effective economic responsibilities’auditing mechanism and penalty system for the leadership, fully utilize the advantages of the effective platform of the leaders’ economic responsibilities’ auditing, innovate the methods that use the leaders’ economic responsibilities’auditing to improve the performance auditing’s development, and strengthen the internal risk evaluation.This dissertation contains three parts and six chapters. First part is chapter one, which is mainly an overview of the government’s performance auditing, including the concepts, characteristics, basic functions, and the theoretical foundation. Second part includes chapters two, three, and four. These three chapters include the history of the development, operating environment, and thorough analysis of the characteristics of performance auditing in the United States. These chapters also include America’s foresight auditing strategy, completeness of the standards and assessment system, scientific risk-avoiding regulations, importance of human capital and etc, summarized from the studying of auditing reports since 1991, field researches in California, Massachusetts, New York, Washington D.C., and many other locations, as well as personal experience. The third part includes chapters five and six. Focusing on our country’s development of a responsible government and the advancement of government performance management, I analyzed the sources of objective conditions, environmental constraints, and production issues. I brought up the train of thought for the active development of the Chinese performance audit by referencing the advanced American performance auditing experiences, improve government environment, innovate of auditing mode means to continually explore appropriate auditing mode and methods which are adapted to the actual situation of development, adhering to our own auditing route with Chinese characteristics. Mention and strengthen the internal management for risk assessment to better exert the immunologic function of the nation’s auditing system. In the current stage, use the economic accountability audit’s group platform and regulation’s advantages to boost the development of both economic accountability audit and performance auditing. The train of thoughts is fully using economic accountability audit to help the development of performance auditing in China.