There are four stages to a performance audit: initiating, planning, examining and reporting.

Initiating

If you have been chosen for an audit, our team will get in touch with you to explain the audit process.

We then send you a formal notification letter and book a meeting with you.

At the opening meeting, we explain the audit process and answer any questions that you may have.

Planning

After we notify you of the audit, we develop the audit plan.

We gather information about your government and the service that we are auditing. This may include making site visits, asking questions or requesting documentation so that we can better understand the best approach we will take for the audit.

After we have the information we need, we can then determine the objective, scope and criteria for the audit. We’ll explain the audit’s goal, what we’ll look at during the audit and how we’ll evaluate it. We will answer questions and resolve any concerns before proceeding.

Examination

After we have agreed on an audit plan, we begin the examination phase.

We work closely with local government staff during this phase, looking at documents and interviewing staff to gather information. As part of this phase, our team will reach out to confirm what we have collected is accurate and complete.

Reporting

Once we have gathered all the information we need, we finalize our findings. We confirm all key facts and findings with you and again confirm that our information is accurate and complete.

We then prepare a draft version of our performance audit report. This report contains our observations, conclusions and recommendations. It is shared with you so that you can comment or make revisions.

We will send the final version of the report to you ahead of the publication date, along with the news release and backgrounder we will publish with it.