Research Of Current Relief Funds Auditing In China

In recent years, China has suffered the attacks of natural disasters frequently, such as the big flood in1998, the Dayao earthquake in2003, the freezing rain and snow disaster in southern China at the beginning of2008and Wenchuan earthquake in12th May, etc. These disasters cause great loss to people’s life and property and threaten the economy development and the social stability. On the other hand, people show their great power in a humanitarian spirit when facing the disasters. Following the earthquake, a large number of relief funds were allocated to the disaster areas from the centre government. At the same time, a large number of donations were sent to the disaster area rapidly from home and abroad. How to effectively take charge of these relief funds, how to make the best use of it has become a difficult test for the government about its public crisis management ability. As an organic part of national public crisis management system, auditing plays a very important role on protecting the funds to be used in a safe and effective way.Relief funds auditing start very late in China. From the flood disaster in1998, to Dayao earthquake in2003, and then to Wenchuan earthquake in2008, China’s relief funds auditing has undergone a progress from afterwards review to follow-up mode, from revealing problems to preventing problems, from auditing by themselves only to joint auditing, generally speaking, from simple to complex. This process also reflects the development of audit idea in the past decades. Now, auditing has become a necessary part of crisis management. It plays a major role in ensuring the safety of fund and exposing the risk and weakness of system. But overall, the relief funds auditing in China is still in the primary stage. There are a lot of institutional and structural defects and problems currently. For example, when the crisis is coming, audit institutions reacts very slowly; Auditors’ capability is not good enough; The audit procedures and methods lack pertinence to crisis; It seems like that there is little law to ensure the problems that auditing has revealed to be solved; The credibility of the auditing reports are generally weak; etc. At present, the research focusing on relief funds auditing is relatively less and have not reached to a systematic results.In this paper, I try to introduce public crisis management theory and auditing theory to explain the characteristics of relief funds auditing and their operation system and mechanism, explore the disadvantages of the current relief funds auditing, analyze the reasons behind the phenomenon, propose the solution of these problems. After careful research, we conclude that relief funds audit system should be improved to be more suitable for crisis, based on the public crisis management theory, to strengthen the auditing function as supervision and prevention. In particular, the program and methods of auditing should be redesigned continuously, based on the follow-up audit mode, in order to make it more responsive to crisis. We should establish an emergency plans for coming crisis as soon as possible, set up a crisis response standing body, mobilize social forces to participate in auditing, enhance the pertinence of relief auditing, make sure the problem would been improved practically, clarify the role of auditing in relief funds management by passing the laws and regulations, enhance the independence of auditing. Through the measures above, we can expect to see the comprehensive and sustainable development of relief funds auditing.