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Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) play an active role in the government's accountability to the parliament. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are a different route used to deliver infrastructure-based public services by private sector entities compared to traditional public procurement. Due to their nature, PPPs raise specific issues related to transparency for public accountability and SAIs, through the independent and competent audit they provide, may enhance the information content of the accountability relationship between the government and the parliament. We conducted a documentary analysis of 16 PPP audit reports issued by the Portuguese Court of Auditors (CoA) to analyze the audit process and outputs. Overall, our evidence suggests that the CoA, through the audit reports, reduced the information asymmetry by disclosing relevant information for more comprehensive public scrutiny and political accountability of PPPs and made several recommendations towards better PPP governance and management. Furthermore, our findings corroborate the two functions of SAIs, which can both be found in the same audit report: the watchdog function (magistrate and public accountant roles), drawing attention to failures at different stages of the PPP cycle, and the shepherding function (management accountant role), providing advice to the Government towards best practices on PPP governance and management. Considering the Government's reactions to the audit reports and the information available about CoA's recommendations implementation, there are doubts about the desired audit impact on the auditee's change of PPPs governance and management.

The studies in the field of the impact of the performance audit are an important part of understanding the usefulness of this kind of audit. The literature analysis revealed that there are a few different types of the performance audit impact. Despite studies on various forms of impact, there is a gap in research. This gap is the impact on the user – the public – of the performance audit results. The purpose of the study is to explain the variety of impacts of performance audits and justify the necessity to continue researching the field. The task of review is to investigate the studies carried out, explain the variety of impacts, find gaps in those studies and define the field for further research. The object of the study is the impact of performance audit. The following research methods were used: review of scientific literature, content analysis.

Mediante el presente ensayo se pretende hacer un análisis acerca de la aplicabilidad de la NTC-ISO 19011 de 2012 en la agencia de inteligencia, adicional a ello se verificara y se detectaran las etapas generales de auditoria dentro del proceso, teniendo en cuenta que la auditoria es una herramienta de apoyo al sistema de gestión. The present essay intends to make an analysis about the applicability of NTC-ISO 19011 of 2012 in the intelligence agency, in addition to this it will be verified and the general stages of audit within the process will be verified, taking into account that the audit is A tool to support the management system. Pregrado

There have been uncertainties to what a performance audit generates, as audit impact have an inherent causality problem. Prior studies present several factors that affect perceived audit impact, but the generalizability is low and not applicable in a Swedish context, thus this thesis contributes to the development of the existing knowledge by investigating audit impact. This thesis consists of a sample of three performance audits which are investigated through a mix methods approach with a total 23 interviews and multiple public documents, analyzed with earlier studies and theories as a benchmark. The findings indicate that audit impact is complex where several factors affect audit impact, this thesis indicated that usefulness and quality of the performance audit are the main factors that affects perceived audit impact. There are also additional effects by the performance audit that fall outside of the audit impact definition. Due to the small sample size and the fact that performance audits often are regulated by local laws one must be careful in what context these findings are solely applied in another context.

In 2008, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance sent letters to clients of a fraudulent tax preparer, warning them of a possible audit and asking them to participate in the Department’s Voluntary Disclosure and Compliance Program if they had filed inaccurate tax returns in the past. This study examines the impact of the letters on voluntary compliance in their future (2008 and 2009) returns. In this study, a simple method similar to “difference in differences”, which we call “difference in positions”, is applied. 10,000 samples are randomly drawn from the taxpayer population and the growth rates of Federal adjusted gross income (AGI) for these samples are put into relative frequency density graphs. We then examine the relative positions of the experiment group (the clients of the fraudulent tax preparer) within the normally distributed curves before and after the letters were sent. The change in the relative positions is regarded as the letter impact on voluntary compliance. It is found that the impact is significant in the first year (2008 tax returns) after the letters were sent. The impact is 17.49 percentage points on the AGI growth rate, which translates to $8.68 million of reported AGI for the 507 taxpayers in the experiment group. However, the impact is minimal in the second year (2009 tax returns), indicating that the long-run effect of the letter mailings may be weak.