Study On The Evaluation Indicators System For Performance Auditing Of Public Environmental Project

As the fast development of Chinese economy in the recent years, the pressure of pollution on natural environment is becoming worse and worse, which brings profoundly negative influence on many aspects of the society. In order to prevent pollution, improve environment and public health, China government has made great effort through supplying substantive financial support to build up many efficient public environmental projects. To supervise how these projects works, evaluate their efficiency comparing with the investment and judge whether they have archived the designed function goal, it is necessary to carry out performance auditing on them. The pivotal point, which is also one of the hardest parts, of performance auditing on public environmental projects is to set up an efficient evaluation indicators system. Public environmental projects have intensive environmental and social effects and extensively benefit many aspect of our society development. It is unilateral to estimate public environmental projects merely through financial indicators like the direct economic income and will lead to wrong estimate conclusions. In the field of both theoretical and practical performance auditing, the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is widely applied. In this thesis, adopting the strategy of BSC, the author built a performance auditing indicator system for public environmental projects respectively from four levels including financial perspective, customer perspective, internal process perspective and learning and growth perspective.The indicator system, which includes nineteen quantificational and qualitative sub-indicators, is integrated by the causational relationship insides: the financial perspective is the core and focus of the other three levels; the customer perspective is a momentum of financial perspective as well as result of internal process perspective; the internal process perspective is also a momentum of customer perspective as well as result of learning and growth perspective; learning and growth perspective is the momentum of realizing the designed object of projects. Furthermore, there are also causational relationships between sub-indicators included in each level.It is one of the most important parts to identify the weight of every indicator when carry out performance auditing. Because according to the weight of indicators, the auditor will be able to efficiently organize his energy and ensure to put the most efforts on the most important part. The weight that confirmed by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is more scientific and logical than any other methods, so that, the author employes AHP to identify weights of indicators in the newly established system. Firstly questionnaires are sent to the experts to collect their opinions, according to which interpretable matrixes are then constructed and used to calculate the weight of every indicator following AHP method. And finally, the calculated weights are confirmed by the way of identification test. Additionally, the newly established indicator system also includes detailed instructions to meaning of every indicator, functions of calculating the quantificational indicators and methodology of applying the indicators, which make the system more exercisable.Practice is the only effective way to check a theory. In order to estimate the actual feasibility of the newly established evaluation indicators system for performance auditing of public environmental projects, the author applied it in a simulative performance auditing of the M wastewater treatment plant in Qingdao. Values of indicators were elicited from the datum of this plant according to the explanation of the instruction system and then compared with certain audit standards, which include Discharge standard of pollutants for municipal wastewater treatment plant issued by State Environmental Protection Administration, Build standards of projects for municipal wastewater treatment issued by Ministry of Construction, the standards of the wastewater treatment industry and the designed functional goals of the project. Basing on the results of this comparison, the plant is graded on every indicator. And them, after timing every score with its weight, the finally conclusion for performance auditing of M wastewater treatment plant came out to be good.In this thesis, the theory of BSC was applied in the establishment of indicator system for performance auditing of public environmental projects and came up with a suit of comprehensive, reasonable, feasible and comparable evaluation indicators special for performing auditing of public environmental projects. With the scarcity of useful evaluation indicator system for performing auditing of public environmental projects, this new system will be widely applied and definitely promote the development of performing auditing theoretically and practically.