Problems And Countermeasures In The Government Audit Of PPP Projects

In recent years,with the development of China's economic development into a new stage,the State Council and various ministries and commissions have successively introduced a number of policy measures to promote the Public-Private Partnership(PPP)model in the public services.This new supply way of public goods has gradually attracted the attention of all sectors of society by virtue of its ability to effectively reduce the financial burden and improve the supply of public goods more efficiency.However,the short time of launching PPP projects in China and limited practice experience,what lead to many problems in the implementation of PPP projects,such as “fake equity real debt”,government commitment,neglect of operation,imperfect performance appraisal and so on.This not only make the projects run counter to the original intention and aggravate the debt risk of local government.In order to respond to the call of full coverage audit,which proposed in the 18 th National Congress,carrying out the PPP projects audit is an important part of curbing local government debt and promoting the efficiency of projects.Therefore,it is imperative for audit institution to conduct audit on PPP projects,which will help the projects' operation being up to specification and ensure that public goods supplied meet the needs of the public.Since both PPP projects and traditional government-invested projects provide public goods or services to the public,they are similar to each other to a certain extent.Therefore,audit institutions still use the traditional government-invested project audit mode when auditing PPP projects.However,it should be noted that PPP projects have more diversified interest demands than traditional government investment projects and the role of the government in the project has also changed from “supervision manager” to “partner”.The management responsibility of the project is generally assumed by the project company instead of government in PPP projects and it presents the characteristics of the whole life cycle process.In addition,the PPP projects have a long cycle,large investment scale and multi-participation.These features make the PPP projects audit different from the traditional government-invested projects audit in the audit object and target.In order to ensure the quality of PPP projects audit and guarantee the objective to practice PPP model in infrastructure,it makes much to clarify the difference between PPP projects audit and traditional government-invested projects audit,analyze the existing issue in PPP projects audit and offer some proposals.Therefore,this paper uses the case study method to take the medical integration project in R country as a case and the project audit process conducted by audit institutions as the research object.According to the research path “raise-analyze-solve”,the paper analyzes the current problems in the audit process of PPP projects in China.The article first reviews the research status of PPP project audits by experts and scholars at home and abroad and then extracts the characteristics of PPP projects based on the comparison of PPP projects with traditional government-invested projects.After that,the paper puts forward the reason why the traditional government-invested project audit mode cannot meet PPP projects.By case study,it is found that in the audit process of PPP projects,there are conflicts between the project auditing requirements and the legal environment.And the auditing position is not accurate.What' more,the auditing center of gravity is biased and the whole process tracking auditing is difficult.In auditing process,the auditor pay insufficient attention to government debt risks and performance audits in the operational phase are lacking.Finally,in view of these problems,combined with foreign PPP project audit experience,the following Suggestions are put forward: firstly,improving relevant laws and regulations and the degree of government audit participation in PPP projects.The second is to serve the project objectives and consider the interests of all related parties.Thirdly,the audit institutions should focus on the project management and quality during audit process.Fourthly,paying enough attention to the decision-making of projects and carrying out tracking audit in key stage.Fifthly,the audit should focus on government debt risk during audit process.Sixthly,audit institutions can strengthen the performance audit in the operational stage of the PPP projects.Based on the above Suggestions on PPP project audit,it is expected to contribute to the improvement of PPP project audit quality and provide reference for the standard operation of PPP projects.