Providing Assurance on Performance Reports: Two jurisdictions compared

by Peter Wilkins and John Mayne

December 2002

Introduction

Providing assurance on performance reports is an emerging role for public sector auditors (Mayne, J and Wilkins, P 2004. Believe it or not?: The Emergence of Performance Information Auditing. Chapter in Quality Matters: Seeking Confidence in Evaluation, Auditing and Performance Reporting edited by R Schwartz and J Mayne, Transaction Publishers New Brunswick). Barzelay (1997) calls this "performance information audit".

Performance information auditing can be located on a spectrum someway between assurance on financial information and reporting on value-for-money (vfm). It shares a focus on performance with vfm studies and has the particular benefit of helping Parliamentarians, the Government, agencies and the community focus their attention on areas where performance and accountability can be improved. It also shares with the financial assurance role the purpose of assuring the quality of core information.

Western Australia is the earliest known case where the Parliament formalised a requirement for the Auditor General to provide Opinions on the performance indicators reported by agencies. The Federal Parliament of Canada has more recently required the Auditor General to provide assessments of the performance reports of three agencies.

This paper overviews the audit approaches in these two jurisdictions and makes some observations on some of the significant similarities and differences, and their implications. It is based on the observations of the authors and reports such as Auditor General of Western Australia 1994, 1996,1999 & 2000; Auditor General of Canada 2000.

Information on the experiences in other jurisdictions can be obtained from reports such as Auditor General of Australia 2001a, 2001b; General Accounting Office 2000; Auditor General of Victoria 2001; Controller and Auditor General of New Zealand 2001; National Audit Office 2000, 2001; Office of the Auditor General of British Columbia 2001.

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