Abstract:
Citizens are increasingly demanding better quality service delivery and accountability from
their governments. Also referred to as Value For Money audit, performance auditing is a
systematic, purpose-driven and objective assessment of the performance of government
activities. As governments are required to provide meaningful information on the allocation
of scarce resources as well as the outcomes of its programmes and projects, performance
auditing has become essential to improving governance and performance in the public
sector. Incidentally, many governments and public sector organisations have limited
capabilities to implement impactful performance auditing.
The researcher distributed the questionnaires and their responses have been collected,
compiled and analysed. Along with the questionnaires an interview was done and consulted
various documents and audit reports to assess the nature and extend of VFM audits
conducted by OAG.
The findings confirmed that if more VFM audits are significantly conducted there will be
improvement of economic acquisition of resources, improvement of services and outcomes
achieved, prevention of misuse and reinforcement of accountability of authorities for public
funds. The responses collected also confirmed that with adequate resources and skills the
number of VFM audits can be increased and that the increase in the number of VFM audits
do not necessarily result from the increase of the number of Auditors but that it depends also
on the use of adequate resources.
The OAG Rwanda should invest in both recruiting and training Performance auditors and
acquiring adequate resources namely software to conduct more VFM audits for addressing
growing public scrutiny.
