NAO to publish performance comparisons

21 Mar 11
The National Audit Office plans to issue comparative data about the performance of public bodies, comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse told last week’s CIPFA international conference.
By Mark Smulian


21 March 2010

The National Audit Office plans to issue comparative data about the performance of public bodies, comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse told last week’s CIPFA international conference.

He said the NAO had previously issued only separate reports on departments and projects and had avoided ‘league tables and so forth’.

But he explained: ‘We plan soon to issue comparative material across departments but we are waiting to get it right. We could not do it if what we issued would not stand up to examination.’

This approach builds on what Morse said was the NAO’s realisation that its work has given it ‘a huge knowledge base about the public sector’, from which it could point out good practice.

Morse said this was needed because public sector financial management was still ‘not at the level of maturity it ought to be’.

He added: ‘If you don’t know what things cost it must be quite difficult to make management decisions that give good value for money.’

A delegate from the new auditing authority in Kosovo, set up since the state declared independence from Serbia in 2008, asked Morse about the NAO’s practical impact and politicians’ grasp of its findings.

Morse said: ‘Parliamentarians’ knowledge of finance varies, but quite a lot of new MPs have financial knowledge, and we also offer them specific briefings.

‘People audited do not always act on our recommendations, but there is a power of repetition. If we keep drilling away at the same thing they will eventually do it.’

Morse was joined in his session on the role of the public auditor in developing value for money by Yvan Pederson, assistant auditor general of Denmark.

‘It is crucial that auditors are independent and seen to be so,’ he said, adding that audited bodies needed to be open to criticism.

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