ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on perspectives, practices and issues, and challenges in environmental performance auditing and considers their prospects into the future. An increase in a Supreme Audit Institutions' (SAIs) budget produces a non-linear positive effect on environmental performance auditing due to simultaneous multiple effects that reinforce each other, such as enhancement of skill/capacity, availability of equipment and resources for cooperation. Key challenges confronting environmental performance auditing relate to deficient environmental policy formulation and data and monitoring difficulties; SAIs' mandates and resources; and audit relationships and communication matters. The overwhelming majority of SAIs do have a performance audit mandate, and nearly all of them have access to the national government. Successful collaborations between professionals in government and outside in other professions, such as law, medicine and engineering, are worth emulating in performance auditing. The Working Group on Environmental Auditing that has been promoting cooperation among SAIs on environmental auditing is showing early signs of stress.
