Audit Tips

7 Learnings from Developing Performance Measurement Systems in Legislative Audit Offices

Audit institutions play a recognized and valuable role as accountability officers, providing independent information to legislative assemblies on the performance of governments. But what about their own performance? How do they track their activities and outputs and demonstrate how they foster positive change?

In this Audit Tips, we identify some ways to ensure that public sector audit offices build a sound performance measurement system by drawing from some of the work we have done with SAIs.

10 Tips for Auditing the Sustainable Development Goals

Auditing the SDGs can play a crucial role in ensuring accountability, transparency, and progress towards sustainable development. Fortunately, an SDG audit does not have to be daunting and an SDG lens can be incorporated into most audits. Here we offer 10 tips on how to start auditing the SDGs.

5 Ways to Ensure that Fraud and Waste Hotlines are Effective

Fraud and Waste Hotlines provide citizens with a confidential and anonymous means to report suspicious activity and allow agencies to quickly identify and investigate potential fraud.

In this Audit Tips, we identify some ways to ensure these hotlines are effective.

4 Biases That Could Make An Audit Less Credible

Professional standards dictate that auditors must be objective. However, they are also human and as such are prone to cognitive biases, i.e., systematic errors in judgment. Auditors are vulnerable to a host of such biases because performance auditing involves exercising judgment and making decisions throughout the audit process (in planning, evidence collection, data analysis, managing relationships, reporting, and more).

In this Audit Tips, we identify four cognitive biases that auditors should be especially wary of.

6 Learnings From Establishing a New Audit Function

The British Columbia Mine Audits Unit has been recently created. It plays a key role in the continuous improvement of mining regulation in the province. The team evaluates the Ministry’s oversight of the mining sector and makes public recommendations to government.

In this Audit Tips, we identify some key learnings that may be useful to others when getting a new audit function off the ground.