Course Aim
To determine the gaps between your current and desired knowledge, skills and abilities in these performance measurement, management, and auditing practices, and which practices offer the best opportunities for developing your proficiency. And to determine which roles and practices offer the best opportunities for your audit organization or team to use to increase the value auditors add to the government entities served.
Course Description:
This course will present a framework that pulls various auditor roles and practices into a new service model for auditors to apply to improving performance measurement and management of government organizations. The new auditor service model will be viewed in the context of models of effective governance, service delivery, managing for results, and organizational learning to demonstrate the value of the framework. Situational exercises will help participants understand different ways roles and practices can be used to improve performance measurement and management. Brief case histories of audit organizations that have used multiple roles and practices over the years will demonstrate different ways to change practices over time in response to an evolving performance management environment, as a way to keep increasing the value added by auditors to their government entity. Available training opportunities and a website with informational resources and auditor tools for applying the roles and practices will be presented. The course will conclude with a self-assessment exercise in which participants determine good opportunities in their own situation for developing or improving capabilities for applying specific roles and practices.
Course Content:
- Overview of Roles and Practices
- Recognize a new practice-based framework that combines traditional and non-traditional auditor roles to increase the ways auditors can add value to government entities they audit
- Role 1: Audit Performance or Performance Management Systems
- Recognize how a model of service delivery performance measures can be used for auditing performance
- Distinguish different challenges in auditing entities with reasonable performance measures vs. auditing entities without good measures
- Recognize good-practice performance management cycles auditors can use as controls for auditing performance management systems
- Role 2: Assess Performance Information
- Determine criteria for assessing the relevance and reliability of performance information, and risks of insufficiently relevant data
- Identify the main steps to audit reliability and relevance, and how improving relevance and reliability adds value to performance audits
- Recognize how criteria of standards-setting bodies can be used to assess public performance reports by government entities
- Role 3: Define or Measure Performance (outside the traditional audit process)
- Identify how auditors can provide advice in selecting performance measures or collect performance measurement data while maintaining independence under Government Auditing Standards
- Roles 4 and 5: Encourage or Assist Management, Elected Officials, or Citizens
- Determine how auditors can conduct internal and external advocacy to improve government performance management
- Recognize how auditors can assist management in improving performance management systems while maintaining independence under Government Auditing Standards
- Identify potential conflicts between auditor roles as "attesters" and "preparers" of performance reports
- Recognize how auditors can assist external decision makers (e.g., legislators, citizens) in using performance information
- Auditor Value Added in Using the Roles and Practices
- Determine how to change roles and practices used over time to keep adding more value as performance management in a government organization evolves
