The development of performance auditing in Taiwan

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Performance auditing in Taiwan is at an early stage of development. Although the idea of doing an audit based on economy, efficiency and effectiveness criteria has been a feature of the audit law since 1972, the approach did not materialise until 2007, when Auditor-General Ching-Long Lin took office. Since then, the National Audit Office (NAO) has made great efforts to promote performance auditing in Taiwan. For instance, the Guideline for the NAO on Performance Audit was published in 2009. It began the process of transferring more financial and human resources from traditional financial audits to performance audits (Lin 2012: 6–7). However, the transition to performance audits is not an easy task. It involves not only training existing personnel and hiring new personnel with different professional backgrounds, but also fostering a new organisational culture in which NAO staff are open-minded and willing to adopt a new style of auditing. This is inevitably a slowly evolving process. This chapter describes this process. It begins by describing the context in which the NAO makes performance auditing an organisational priority, the efforts taken by the NAO to promote performance audits and its initial achievements. The chapter also discusses feedback from both NAO personnel and auditees. Finally, general discussion and conclusions about the development of performance auditing in Taiwan are presented.