A Study Of French Performance Audit

In recent years, the word "performance audit" has frequently appeared in the domain of audit researches in China. However, performance audit, which appears a new thing in China, emerged in the late 1940s, developed during 1970s and 1980s, and became the focus of government audit in many countries.In 2007, the French court of accounts celebrates its bicentenary anniversary. This centuries-old national audit institution plays an important role in monitoring the employment of public fund. In 1976, the court of accounts applied performance audit. As the creator of juridical audit, how does it develop performance audit, what characteristics it bears, and why it is capable of doing performance audit are the questions deserve thinking.In order to get a comprehensive understanding of French performance audit, this paper illustrates the organization, the content and scope, the process, and report of French performance audit and concludes that French performance audit bears its own characteristics and is affecting the role of the court of accounts.By a comparison of the audit leadership, juridical protection, the role of auditor, audit techniques, audit criteria, content and report of performance audit between several countries, this paper concludes that the French performance audit shares many common points with other performance audit countries.With the doubt of whether a country could execute performance audit owning the forms of French performance audit, this paper concludes that performance audit is pushed by willing of the audit body with the satisfaction of certain social condition through an analysis of institutional economics theory. A statistical analysis supports this point of view.At last, according to the analysis of French performance audit, this paper concludes that it's not suitable for China to execute large scale of performance audit but it is strong recommended to make experiments in some districts where the economics, politics, and social conditions are more superior and the traditional finance audit is well applied.