A Study On Performance Audit Of Government Invested Environmental Project From The Perspective Of Dual Functions

In recent years, the increasingly serious environmental problems have drawngreat attention of Chinese government. In order to solve environmental problems, theChinese government invests more money in environmental governance andprotection.As a result of it, the scale and quantity of environmental projects areincreasing, and the performance of them is getting more and more attention of thepublic. But there are many problems in projects construction and operation processsuch as idle funds, poor operation effect, weak management control and other issues,which is not very desirable.Performance audit is a control mechanisms which can ensure government fulfillits public accountability effectively, developing with demand changes of governmentpublic administration. Currently studies on environmental performance audit focusprimarily on performance evaluation to verify government performance accountability.They build performance evaluation system with certain performance level model tointegrate all aspects of environmental projects into a general conclusion, to reflect theoverall performance of environmental projects.In the orientation of the evaluationfunction values, audit recommendations are often not given due attention as anaccessory in the audit report, which easily lead to audit recommendations are not highquality, which is difficult to adopt in practice. Performance audit focusing only onperformance evaluation can not meet the government’s requirements of improvingperformance management, so it is imminent to build performance audit evaluation andrecommendation framework which can achieve assurance and advisory dualfunctions.In view of that, this paper do research from the perspective of that performanceaudit to government invested environmental projects should achieve assurance andadvisory dual functions. It builds a performance audit evaluation and recommendationframework to contribute to improving the performance of the government investedenvironmental projects’construction and operation.This paper firstly put forward an idea that performance audit to governmentinvested environmental projects should achieve assurance and advisory dual functionsby analyzing the features of performance audit and the requirements of government public management. And then analyze the requirements of performance audit basedon the dual function positioning. They are “taking the project goal realization degreeas the evaluation basis point” and “taking the project implementation process as thebreakthrough point”. It introduces the idea of logical framework approach (LFA) andimproves it under the demand of performance audit. It builds a performance auditevaluation and recommendation framework from the perspective of dual functions.The framework has five features: taking dual functions into account, project expectedgoal-oriented, taking variance analysis as a starting point, introducing the concept ofperformance attribution and tolerate difference rate. It also explores the applicationprocess of the framework in audit practice, and designs a specific evaluation indexsystem taking a sewage treatment plant project for example. It applies theperformance audit evaluation and recommendation framework to the performanceaudit of X Sewage Treatment Plant upgrading project and tries to make contributionto improve the performance of the project.