绩效审计与公共管理改革外文翻译

外文文献翻译译文原文Performance Audit and Public Management Reform Audit is one of the oldest and most venerable state functions. The French Cour des Comptes traces its origins back to 1318; the UK National Audit Office cites 1314 as the date of its first manifestation; the Dutch Algemene Rekenkamer finds ancestors as running back to 1386.State audit thus long preceded the emergence of modern forms of democratic government. However state audit offices have made many adaptations in the course of their long history and during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they fashioned a crucial role for themselves within the machinery of democratic accountability.On this kind of historical scale, performance audit is a very recent activity. Although more or less plausible claims can be made for the existence of performance audit-like activities back to the 1960s—or even considerably earlier—performance audit as a large-scale, self-considerably distinct practice dates mainly since the late 1970s.Performance audit represents a modern variant of audit—not the only one but, as well shall demonstrate, a challenging and fascinating one. It is distinctive to state audit and does not have a close counterpart in private-sector, commercial audit.Over almost exactly the same period as performance audit has emerged as a distinct form of audit, the government of Western Europe, North America, and Australasia have embarked upon extensive programs of public management reform. These have aimed at modernizing, streamlining, and in some cases minimizing the whole of the state apparatus. Although the details of these reform programs have varied considerably between one country and another, most of them have given a central place to the themes of decentralization and performance management. This has entailed a widespread rethinking of the balance between the autonomy and the control of public organizations. It has generated a search for mechanism and incentives will help realize these new management ideas in practice.Prima facie, it appears highly probable that there is a connection between thesetwo phenomena: on the hand the growth of performance audit and on the other the search for a new solution to the ancient governmental problem of giving autonomy yet retaining control. Y et there seems to have been little systematic investigation of what the nature of this interaction might be. One of our ambitions is to fill this gap. We begin, in the next chapter, by looking at the boundaries and definitions of performance audit, and they move directly to describe the patterns of management reform in the five countries that form the basis for our comparisons: France, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. This provides the context against which later chapters and tease out the connections between the development of performance audit and the forces of management change.If the official descriptions are anything to go by, performance audit is not just a technical tool. It does not at all correspond to the traditional image of auditing as a process cent ered on ‘checking the books’ in order to see that they have been accurately and properly kept. Performance audit has a more ambitious manifesto. Its practitioners declare that they are seeking to establish whether public policies or programs or projects or organizations have been conducted with due regard to economy, efficiency, effectiveness, and good management practice. It thus brings together, in a potent new combination, the older tradition of’’ audit’ with a much more recent focus on ‘performance ‘. T he exact terms within which audit bodies undertake this activity vary from country to country and over time. So we should not rush to say exactly what ‘it’ is or isn’t, but rather should problematize and explore the concept.In that chapter we will also take a brief look at some of the many other uses to which the term ‘audit’ has recently been put, a diversification of meaning and practice that recently led one academic to write an ambitious text entitled The Audit Society. For the moment, however, it will suffice to say that sets of practices termed ‘performance audit’ or value-for-money studies’ have become central activities for an increasingly powerful group of organizations-Supreme Audit Institutions. In most democratic countries, the SAI is located near the heart of the apparatus of the state. Potentially, therefore, performance audit should be of considerable political and democratic significance. It is practiced by powerful, independent institutions and ispresented as a mode of investigation aimed at establishing whether, at what cost, and to what degree the policies, programs, and projects of government are working.Given these general characteristics, one might expect that the considerable community of scholars working in subjects such as political science, public administration, public management, and public finance and accountancy would have generated a large literature about performance audit. Surprisingly, this is not the case. One may speculate on the reasons why SAIs and, within them, performance audit have suffered relative neglect as compared with, say, various aspects of public management reform.Several reasons for the apparent disparity of interest in performance audit and public management reform suggest themselves. To begin with, public management reform has been led—or at least fronted—by politicians, for whom it is natural to make public claims that what they are doing is innovative, valuable, and successful. Furthermore, such change has generated its own supporting ‘industry’, includi ng various kinds of consultant who have taken every opportunity to propel such reform even higher up political and administrative agendas. By contrast, SAIs are single institutions—and generally rather sober ones. The bulk of their work appears to be technical and detailed and they take some pains to stand clear of party political controversy. Typically, supreme audit institutions are mentioned briefly in general textbooks which describe the institutions of government in a given country, but few books or articles have been written specifically about them. The USA, though not part of the present study, was perhaps something of an exception to this general neglect, with a certain amount of analytical literature focusing upon the General Accounting Office. Only in the last few years has the trickle of journal articles and booklets begun to gather some momentum. In the past, SAIs seldom went out of their way to publicize themselves—it is only in the last decade that most of them have begun to produce booklets and brochures for popular consumption, or to deal proactively with the mass media. Some are still cautious in these respects.Finally, there is, of course, a difference of scale. Public management reform has swept across entire public sectors, affecting ministries, executive agencies, quangos,local authorities, and other kinds of public body. SAIs, by contrast, are single organizations, seldom employing more than a few hundred staff. Thus, changes in what auditors do simply do not appear to be as important or newsworthy as changes that affect the work of tens or hundreds of thousands of public officials, and which may impact directly on citizens’ use of public services.Even if the above considerations go some way towards explaining the relative lack of media and scholarly attention given to the development of performance audit, that does not mean that such activities are insignificant. On the contrary—and as we shall show--performance audit has become the largest single activity for some SAIs and an important part of the work of all the SAIs in this study. This is a relatively recent development. Although the definition of performance audit is less than straightforward, it is probably accurate to say that, allowing for some earlier, partial precedents, its emergence as a distinct and mainstream activity dates mainly from the late 1970s and 1980s. Thus, over the last two decades, a number of SAIs have invested a considerable proportion of their resources in developing a relatively new area of activity, one that is directly focused on those issues of performance that have themselves become such a central focus of concern for modern governments.While governments have declared themselves to be intensely concerned with the ‘three Es’ (economy, efficiency, and effec tiveness) at the same time as SAIs have been developing performance audit as a way of investigating those same three Es, the connection between these two lines of activity has not been as straightforward as might at first appear. Of course, some impacts are fairly obvious. For example, a recent UK National Audit Office handbook acknowledges that performance audit has had to respond to the fact that: ‘Two thirds of government business is now carried out by agencies, outputs and delivery are more important than inputs, and there is much greater involvement of the private sector in the delivery of publicly funded programs’. This is an example of a direct influence, running from public management reform to performance audit. However, the whole picture is considerably more complicated, with direct and indirect influences running in both directions.Our aim has therefore been to study the practice of performance audit and relateit to contemporary developments in public management. We have investigated the ‘state of the art’ of performance audit and explored its links wi th the processes of management reform. In empirical terms, we have had twin foci. First, we have gathered material about public management reform in each country—this describes the context in which SAIs have developed performance audit. Much of this has necessarily been secondary data, though some of it derives from other recent work by members of our team. Second, in relation to the performance audit side of the relationship, we have conducted extensive primary research. Our main focus has been on the performance audit report and on the process that leads up to that report. Some other recent work, though conceptually sophisticated, has been limited by its reliance on a more general type of evidence. We would contend that the acid test of what performance audit ’is’ ,or is capable of, may lie more in the bedrock of individual audits than in the superstructure of what SAIs say about performance audit in general, although both types of evidence are, of course, useful in their own right.We have therefore counted, categorized, and read a large number of audit reports. In practical terms, these seemed the least unsatisfactory unit for comparative analysis. They had the advantage of being concrete, discrete, and the basis for a number of recording systems within SAIs themselves. Unfortunately, however, they also carried some disadvantages. First, not all SAIs distinguish between performance audit reports and other types of report. Second, not all performance audit reports are in the public domain. Third, there are other important performance audit ‘products’ apart from individual reports. For example, some performance audit work by the NAO takes the form of unpublished reports to departments rather than reports to the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. The bulk of the Cour’s work on bonne gestion takes place in the form of unpublished communications with the audited bodies and the ministries, often at ministerial level. Fourth, there is very considerable variation both between and within performance audit reports. They come in different shapes and sizes in different countries, and even within the corpus of a single SAI such reports may be long or short, expensive or cheap, very broad or quite narrow in scope, etc. Indeed, these variations are one of the features we describe and comment upon.Finally, it should be pointed out that choosing a different unit of analysis would likely have yielded different insights, but at the same time, and by the same token, would probably have concealed or obscured some of the features that our focus on reports has illuminated. For example, we have encountered some difficulty in analyzing the methods used in performance audit, partly because some reports use a variety of methods within a single study while others say virtually nothing about which methods may have been adopted.In conclusion, we should say that, although this work is certainly not intended to be prescriptive, we have nevertheless thought it appropriate in the final chapter, to set out an agenda for discussion. Drawing from our descriptions and analyses, we have identified a number of issues likely to shape the future development of performance audit. In effect, these constitute a set of strategic choices, with significant implications for the roles of SAIs. Some of these issues could be clarified by further research. All of them could benefit from wider and deeper debate. Just as politics is too important to be left to the politicians, the activities of our Supreme Audit Institutions are too important to be left exclusively to auditors.Source: Christopher Pollott, Hikka Summa. Performance Audit and Public Management Reform[M], Performance or Compliance, 2009.译文绩效审计与公共管理改革审计是最古老且最庄严的国家职责之一，法国审计院的历史可以追溯到1318年。