ABSTRACT
This chapter provides guidelines for how the public sector might choose to commission an audit, and the overall ramifications of any chosen approach. Audits tend to be conducted in the teeth of shifting policy, shifting personnel, shifting priorities and VFM concerns normal everyday public sector business. This is to say that, in the example where it is expedient to achieve the corporate aim of confirming compliance/performance/VFM and so on whilst keeping good client/contractor relations, most auditors will feel it acceptable to be cast as something foisted upon the client, rather than as a deliberate choice by the management team. A one-off performance audit is useful in itself, but has effectively nil impact if there is insufficient client-side management time available to manage through any corrective actions. In summary, an audit instruction and its subsidiary an audit context are frameworks for a formal exercise meant to discover a series of factual truths.
