Research On Performance Audit Of Universities Operated Directly Under The Ministry Of Education

Performance audit is a new type of audit that is gradually formed with the development of economy and society, and is an important part of modern audit. A modern audit system with high objective and broad content is built by performance audit and financial audit together. At present, performance audit accounts for over 50% of the audit resources in many western countries, and over 90% in United States, which including national defense, education, agriculture, environment, health, social security, tax and so on. Along with the perfecting and developing of our market economy, developing of economy, transforming of government functions, and enhancing of people's democratic awareness, economy and efficiency of fiscal fund utilization attract more and more attention from government and public. The government and public request that the audit department not only supervise strictly the legitimate of economic activities in public departments, but also supervise the rationality of economic activities, and efficiency and economy of fiscal fund utilization to build up performance consciousness and improve operating efficiency of public departments.In 1999, the Audit Commission clearly put forward the plan to develop the performance audit. The development planning of performance audit was made in "Development Program of Auditing between 2003 and 2007", "Development Program of Auditing between 2006 and 2010", and "Development Program of Auditing between 2008 and 2012". And the development and research direction of performance audit were pointed. Higher education expenditure is an important part of national fiscal expenditure. In 1999, the decision of accelerating the development of higher education was made on the 3rd National Conference of Education, and after that the higher education entered into a high-speed lane. The government increases the investment on higher education year by year, the scale of higher education institutions continuously enlarges, the source channel of fund becomes wider, fund expenditure is more and more diverse, and economy activities are more complicate, administration of higher education institutions are transforming from going after the social benefits to both social benefits and economic benefits. Audit must adjust itself to the rapid development of higher education as an important control mechanism in higher education accountability system, and the audit focuses gradually transit from traditional audit to performance audit to reach the objectives of "serving for preventing the economy risks of education institutes, serving for increasing the efficiency of education fund utilization, and serving for resolving the prominent contradiction conducted by the education reform and development".Universities operated directly under the Ministry of Education are the represents selected from all the universities according to the principle of "one university per ministry", which are very strong representative. The performance audit of universities in China was studied based on the universities operated directly under the Ministry of Education and their relative data in this study. Firstly, the research situation of performance audit and performance audit of universities were summarized, and the theoretical basis of performance audit of universities was described. Secondly, the practice situation of performance audit of universities was introduced based on the situation in United States, Australia, and England. And the borrowing experience was also summarized. Lastly, the development of performance audit of universities in China was analyzed, the limitation of performance audit of universities implementation was analyzed, and corresponding system of performance audit was built. At the same time, the basic methods and quality control of performance audit was described.