New audit approach with poor support

When RiR was formed, the 3AG announced that a new audit approach would be applied. The approach was new in several senses.

• Performance audit would aim at providing a basis for holding someone responsible (Swedish: ansvarsutkrävande). It would also be based primarily on established norms and regulations.⁴⁷

• Co-operation between financial audit and performance audit should be intensified, as mirrored in the organization design.

• A “concern perspective” should be adopted, where more general conclusions should be drawn in the yearly reports.

• Improved/increased quality assurance.

• New templates and a new process, where projects would only continue if the pre study (Swedish: förstudie) indicated that there were severe issues at the audited authority.

With regard to these five aspects of the new audit approach, personnel requested guidance as to how they were meant to be implemented in practice. Neither department managers, nor 3AG could provide such guidance. While waiting for this, auditors continued to conduct audit as before.

Everyone talks about the new mandate, and there are rumours saying that the Auditor-Generals want something else, but we still do not know what they want, they have not really communicated it.

an auditor (Carrie, 16 October, 2003) explained, adding that it felt as if auditors had no freedom any more, since they did not know what the new approach meant, and also because department managers stood more in focus than auditors.

These five aspects would continue to cause debate throughout the years to come, except perhaps for the matter of templates.

Auditors claimed that an audit based on formal norms and focused on pointing out someone as responsible (see RiR business plans

47According to the RiR Business Plan (Swedish: verksamhetsplan) for year 2004, p.14. This was repeated in the business plans for all the following years. In the RiR business plan for 2005, the RiR “undertaking” was defined (p.9): “We shall conduct audits of high quality and in accordance with good practice, which promotes insight and provides a basis for decisions and for holding someone responsible”

2007), was not what had been intended by Parliament when RiR was formed, nor did it comply with the role that they meant national audit should play in society. They also argued that this type of audit would make their profession a mere matter of trivial compliance audit. Few auditors would be interested in such rather simple tasks. The debate on the RiR mandate continued throughout all four years of this study, following the merger.

Concerning co-operation between professions, both financial auditors and performance auditors found it difficult to identify ways to co-operate. It was argued that in most projects, such co-operation would either not be feasible, or not be fruitful. Towards year 4, seminars were arranged to discuss how this co-operation could be implemented, and examples of successful co-operation projects were presented in the staff magazine.

With regard to the concern perspective, a Challenge Project (Swedish:

bågspännarprojektet) was established by the 3AG in May, 2004. On the Intranet (14 May, 2004), it was announced:

The three Auditors-General have together decided that RiR shall take up the challenge to draw comprehensive conclusions from different audits when it comes to how the Government runs authorities and companies and how the Government reports to Parliament. Bow-drawing shall take place by including, already in operations planning, to prepare for complete conclusions to be drawn about the Government steering and reporting to Parliament.

To what extent the 3AG should form conclusions like these was also subjected to debate through the years. Personnel increasingly argued that the 3AG just wanted media attention, and claimed that reports should stand in focus. According to auditors, it was difficult to draw trustworthy, reliable general conclusions simply from these reports.

The striving for media attention could be explained partly by the structure surrounding RiR, where RiR partly was dependent upon politicians and the media for reports to have any impact. However, many auditors also emphasized that this impact often could be accomplished already by the fact that an authority knew it was being subjected to a performance audit.

The 3AG announced that there would be improved routines for quality control, because quality had varied in reports from RRV and PA. This quality control would primarily be conducted by the 3AG themselves.

After some time, auditors started to object to this routine, as they sometimes got different advice from the same Auditor-General, from different Auditor-Generals/managers, or they found the criticism poorly substantiated. None of the 3AG had worked much with performance audit on a concrete level, and this was being increasingly questioned by auditors, who claimed that they did not understand the way they worked. The definition of quality was questioned, and auditors started to argue that, due to the lack of support in this ambition to increase quality, it was rather a matter of quality control than quality assurance or support.

Auditor-General Luke (20 November, 2003) explained that financial audit was already “rather tightly controlled”, but performance audit was not. It could be conducted in many different ways, he said, and continued:

Now, we enter a new phase. […] We mean that we take a grip and lead these operations as Auditor-Generals in a way that they have not done before. And if you consider that they have been allowed to decide themselves very much before, what to audit and forms for audit, depending on the project, project leader, and employee, to all of a sudden there come requests from above and outside on what to audit, only this is a major change.

With regard to the lack of directions for the new approach in performance audit, the 3AG often referred to personnel themselves for finding ways to implement this approach. Luke explained (20 November, 2003):

Many employees want a very high degree of participation, but they want very, very clear answers and directives about everything that is to be – and that is not really compatible. You have to participate yourself in formulating the way to work.

In year 3, the VÄGEN project was formed to discuss the formal mandate of RiR. Around March 2007 (year 4), a member of the VÄGEN project explained that they thought they actually had been able to influence the way that the 3AG reasoned in the matter.

4.4.5 Less autonomy and a growing discontent with