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Principles
Both activities involve the examination of policy design, implementation processes and their consequences to provide an assessment of economy, efficiency and effectiveness of an entity or activity. They require similar knowledge, skills and experience and involve similar methods for collecting and analysing data.
The main difference is the context in which they take place and the purpose of each. Performance audit is superimposed on an accountability framework, which implies that the Commission and other institutions and organisations concerned are held responsible for the management of EU funds and should provide meaningful and reliable information to demonstrate and take responsibility for performance in light of agreed expectations. Performance audits are carried out by auditors who maintain their independence to select and determine the manner in which to conduct their work, and report the results to the [a-glossary term="Discharge%20authority"]discharge authority[/a-glossary]
(European Parliament acting on the recommendation of the Council).It is therefore not the purpose of the ECA's performance audits to deliver comprehensive evaluations of EU activities. This is the responsibility of the Commission, member states and other managers of EU activities.
However, performance audits will usually include evaluative elements of selected subjects and consider evaluation systems and information with a view to assessing their quality and, when they are considered to be satisfactory and relevant, use [link title="evaluation" link="%2Faware%2FPA%2FPages%2FExamination%2FEvaluation.aspx" /]
information as audit evidence.
Instructions
Audit selection and planning phase
Potentially relevant sources of ideas:
- evaluation plans and programmes (e.g. of Commission DGs) give insight into upcoming decisions on policies, programmes and political priorities as well as details on the timing and purpose of planned evaluations. This information could be useful to auditors in identifying audit subjects or objectives;
- manuals and guidance can provide useful explanations on the use of the many techniques common to evaluation and performance audit - individual Commission DGs and DG Budget, SAIs, international organisations and evaluation societies all produce materials that are potentially useful to auditors in developing their approach and methods;
- lists of experts with quality assessments of the work of different providers published by Budget DG on the Commission’s intranet. Most providers are also associated to evaluation societies. Such information is helpful to auditors seeking to use the services of external experts both in identifying suitable candidates and possible conflicts of interest;
- evaluation reports (including impact assessments) usually include a considerable amount of information that will enable auditors to understand the audit field and plan the audit e.g. to identify relevant issues or problems, the stakeholders, the objectives of interventions, the logic of the intervention, potential audit criteria, the data available and appropriate methods for analysis.
Audit fieldwork and reporting stages
Possible information created by evaluation activities:
- Information collected from past evaluations can act as baselines for performance audits e.g. in audits aiming to conclude on whether initiatives taken resulted in improvements;
- Evaluations often involve the creation of information not available from other sources that could either be used directly or reanalysed to address
[link title="audit%20questions" link="%2Faware%2FPA%2FPages%2FPlanning%2FDeveloping-audit-questions.aspx" /]
;
- Good quality evaluations can produce reliable
[link title="conclusions" link="%2Faware%2FPA%2FPages%2FReporting%2FConclusions.aspx" /]
about the [link title="economy" link="%2Faware%2FPA%2FPages%2FConcepts%2FEconomy.aspx" /]
, [link title="efficiency%20" link="%2Faware%2FPA%2FPages%2FConcepts%2FEfficiency.aspx" /]
or [link title="effectiveness" link="%2Faware%2FPA%2FPages%2FConcepts%2FEffectiveness.aspx" /]
of an intervention directly relevant to one or more of the [link title="audit%20objectives" link="%2Faware%2FPA%2FPages%2FPlanning%2FDeveloping-audit-questions.aspx" /]
;
- Evaluations results can also act as corroborative
[link title="evidence" link="%2Faware%2FGAP%2FPages%2FAudit-evidence.aspx" /]
for the our own studies, e.g. where the audit was carried out in parallel on a different basis but address some of the same issues. In such a case the results of the evaluation could either provide further positive evidence supporting our conclusions or, where different conclusions were reached, lead auditors to reconsider their evidence and if necessary carry out further testing;
- Evaluation reports and responses to them usually contain
[link title="recommendations" link="%2Faware%2FGAP%2FPages%2FRecommendations.aspx" /]
or action plans which may or may not have been acted upon - reviewing recommendations and their follow up can thus provide evidence about the quality of management as well as give examples of pertinent recommendations not implemented which could be taken up by the ECA.
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