On The Evaluation Criteria Of The State-owned Enterprises' Performance Audits System Using Balanced Scorecard

Audit assessment is one of three basic functions. It is a professional way used by independent body or person to verify the truth, measure with certain standards, and publish the result in the form of audit opinion. There are three major auditing in today's professional field:civil audit, governmental audit and internal audit. Civil audit mainly involves with civil financial audit, while governmental audit and internal audit involves with both financial audits and performance audits. The current financial audit has been quite mature in the situation, but the performance audit is at a low level. Many problems of performance audit have not been properly studied, and one of the major problems in China is the lacking of a set of evaluation criteria and application methods of audit performance. The only reference is the existing laws, regulations, mandatory requirements. This brings a lot of troubles for the audit staff to evaluate enterprises performance and also increases the audit risk. The question of how to build the evaluation criteria and application system is still not answered. Due to the differences between the audit projects, objectives, evaluation criteria, it is difficult to formulate a unified and detailed evaluation criteria system. Performance audit is the trend of Chinese audit development. Besides the performance audit, the performance audits evaluation criteria can also play a guiding role in direction of business management. People can improve their management practices in accordance with the requirements of performance audits evaluation criteria. Under the complete evaluation criteria system, "what" evaluated will be done by the enterprises, and"what"has been done will meet the requirements of evaluator. Therefore the research on performance audit evaluation criteria has significant theoretical and practical meaning in the professional field.This paper introduces the domestic and international state-owned enterprises'performance audit evaluation criteria, analyzes current situation and the existing problems of performance audit system of Chinese state-owned enterprises and systematically expounds the theory of the Balanced Scorecard. And, at last the paper explores the contraction and application of state-owned enterprise performance audit evaluation criteria based on Balanced Scorecards.