Strategic Governance of Moroccan State-Owned Enterprises: Risk Mapping Through External Public Auditing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the Court of Accounts as a Supreme Audit Institution (SAI) in the reinforcement of the Strategic Accountability of Moroccan State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). It tries to determine the extent to which its annual reports impact strategic governance of the public portfolio of SOEs in terms of economy, efficiency, effectiveness, ethics and environment (5Es). First, using the analysis of the historical evolution of this constitutional institution we tried to demonstrate its growing contribution and structural effects on key strategic processes of SOEs. We highlight the methodology followed by the Court of Accounts in auditing strategic governance of SOEs and its role in the protection of principles and values of good governance, transparency and accountability of the SOEs particularly in the aftermath of the new Constitution of 2011. Secondly, we focused our analysis on the importance of strategic governance in the Court of Accounts' annual reports. We concluded that the strategic governance systems of SOEs are in failure, dysfunctional and show many weaknesses that are highlighted by the public auditors. These results allowed us to confirm our hypothesis about the strategic accountability of the key actors involved in strategic governance of SOEs and to characterize the main levers to enhance strategic governance of the public portfolio of SOEs in terms of corporate governance, corporate strategy (design, implementation and assessment), mission, vision and also information systems. Furthermore, this research enabled us to modelize the key actors which are accountable (Line Ministries, Governance Organs, Executive management), determine their strategic responsibilities, extract for each key actor a set of key processes and procedures relating to strategic governance of SOEs. At the light of the major findings of this qualitative research and through a systemic approach we identified the main risks facing strategic governance of the Moroccan SOEs and we mapped them in a risk identification grid constituting the main points of the strategic accountability of SOEs. Finally, the results of this research allowed us to conclude that beyond its coercive, dissuasive and repressive dimensions, the corpus of annual reports of the Moroccan Court of Accounts has particularly a pedagogical and managerial dimension. This arises a fundamental question which is: How to increase the pedagogical dimension of the external public audit conducted by the Court of Accounts and to what extent can we establish the foundations of strategic accountability of SOEs in order to assess objectively their strategic governance and determine the responsibility of each strategic actor? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]