Reform approaches in the public sector led to significant changes in its design. Especially New Public Management-inspired reform measures – which aimed at decentralization and organizational disaggregation – created pluriform landscapes of public sector organizations. With such a development, issues of public governance and public auditing, more broadly, have become ever more crucial: audit institutions represent the only state authorities which have a comprehensive overview on these organizational landscapes, and also the legal mandate to examine public sector organizations’ performance: “The main objective of performance auditing is constructively to promote economical, effective and efficient governance.” (INTOSAI: ISSAI 300)
In addition, and based on their evaluations, audit institutions may suggest specific measures to further improve performance and task execution of public sector organizations. The degree to which public sector organizations’ managements follow those suggestions depends on several factors, such as their perception of audit quality, on how the media, political opposition, and government react to audit reports, on an organization’s respective policy field, and on the general image the management has of the audit institution. Consequently, the question of public audit institutions’ effectiveness (i.e. how useful their activities are perceived by auditees and if audits lead to factual changes) turns our scholarly interest to the perspective of auditees, which in fact represent the audit institutions’ ‘clients’.
Empirical studies on the subject of the effectiveness of public auditing and its association with the quality of governance from a customer perspective are relatively scarce (notable exceptions are Morin 2008 and 2014, Raudla et al. 2015, Reichborn-Kjennerud 2013, and Reichborn-Kjennerud and Johnson 2015). By conducting a survey among all organizationally independent public sector organizations of the City of Vienna, Austria, that have been subjected to a performance audit between 2010 and 2015, we intend to highlight the effectiveness of public audits from a clients’ perspective, i.e. how useful they are perceived by the organizations’ management and if they lead to actual change. The City of Vienna represents an excellent case of a ‘Germanic’-style administration (which indicates indirect influence of audit institutions via political pressures: Torres et al. 2016); about one third of all 90,000 staff working for the city government are employed in agencies or corporatizations controlled by the city.
The city’s court of audit actively supports our study, which is at this moment work in progress. The survey will be conducted by the end of 2016, and we expect to have first empirical findings and conceptual results to be present at the IRSPM meeting in Budapest.
D4 - Governance and Management of State-Owned Enterprises, Corporate Forms and Agencies on
