| The affordable housing project is a people’s livelihood project with Chinese characteristics.Since 2007,China has issued such policy documents relating to affordable housing projects as Several Opinions of the State Council on Solving Housing Difficulties of Urban Low-income Families and Measures for the Administration of Lowrent Housing Guarantee Funds,aiming at addressing the housing problems of low-and middle-income groups,migrant workers and fresh graduates.The projects,featuring large amounts of funds and a long construction time,have drawn the attention of the state and the public.Therefore,the government audit needs to supervise the project and make suggestions.Since 2009,the National Audit Office has brought the projects into the national livelihood audit projects,and audits of affordable housing projects have been gradually launched all over the country.Although great achievements in the real-time audit of affordable housing have been made in prefecture-level cities,there are some difficulties in practice due to its economic backwardness and technology shortage.Based on the above background,this paper conducts research on the follow-up audit of affordable housing projects.First,the author explains the research backgrounds and significance of real-time audits of affordable projects,and reviews previous studies concerning the follow-up audit of affordable housing projects.In addition,the concepts relating to the follow-up audit of the projects are defined and the theoretical basis is presented in the study.What’s more,this paper discusses the status of tracking audits of the projects from different aspects,conducting that there are three problems in carrying out the audits of the affordable housing projects: first,the lack of the deterrent effect of government audits,second,the lack of guidelines in the projects,third,the insufficient disclosure of audit results.More importantly,the paper,taking the tracking audit of the affordable housing projects in GZ city as an example,argues that there are such problems as an unreasonable structure of the audit team,the lack of in-depth use of big data audit,non-standardized performance evaluation system,and unsatisfied presentation and application of audit results.Further,the paper finds that these problems are mainly caused by many factors as follows,frist,there exists insufficient resources and a single specialty of the auditors;second,there is the lack of a data sharing platform and auditors’ insufficient understanding of big data,thus resulting in underutilization of big data;third,there exists an overlap between the content of performance audits and tracking audits,and the performance evaluation system has not completed.Fourth,There is no mandatory requirement to publish audit announcements,and it is difficult for auditors to use the results,and thus the use of audit results is unsatisfactory.Finally,considering the national affordable housing projects and problems existing in GZ city,the paper makes suggestions to improve the pre-audit training quality of auditors and strengthen the construction of compound talents in colleges and universities;in addition,many efforts are made in the establishment of the data sharing platform and collection of information;the performance evaluation audit process and indicators are also needed to be standardized,and the announcement and recommendations of followup audit are greatly strengthened.More importantly,research-based audits need to be conducted well-considered to provide an empirical role in the formation of audit guidelines,thus tackling problems in the follow-up audits of affordable housing projects. |
