5 Practices Your Public Accounts Committee Can Adopt to Improve Cross-Party Collaboration
The role of the PAC is different than that of other committees. PAC members need to work together across parties and focus on ensuring accountability and improving public administration.
Collaborative Audit Lessons Learned from the Pan-Canadian Climate Change Audit – 2016-2018
From 2016 to 2018, the provincial and federal legislative audit offices of Canada worked together to assess the progress made by Canadian governments in addressing climate change, one of the defining challenges of our time. Audit reports were produced in all jurisdictions and the project culminated with a summary collaborative report issued in March 2018. It was the first time that all these audit offices worked together on a project of this scope. In this special Featured Audit, Kristin Lutes, a contributor to the collaborative audit, describes how the project evolved and shares the key lessons that were learned during its execution.
Driving Results: How Data Models Can Add Value to Performance Audits
Public sector agencies generate large amounts of data from their program management activities, but not all agencies extract the full value out of their data. However, auditors can help close this gap. By using data analytics tools and data models, auditors can mine an agency’s data to generate novel and valuable insight about the effectiveness of programs and services. In this article, Jessica Schafer of the Office of the Auditor General of British Columbia explains how using a data model during an audit of commercial vehicle safety helped her team to provide new information to government officials and legislators on the effectiveness of roadside inspections and traffic enforcement.
