The Auditor-General undertakes financial audits for over 560 public sector entities each year. The Auditor-General uses VAGO staff to undertake around a third of these financial report audits. For the remaining audits, the Auditor-General contracts private sector firms (audit service providers) to assist. VAGO reviews this work and all audit opinions are issued on behalf of the Auditor-General.
We largely use our own professionally qualified and trained staff to deliver performance audits. However, we also engage experts to advise or work with our performance audit teams on complex and technical issues and use contractors to supplement staff resources where required.
We deliver a range of attest services to public sector agencies. We conduct financial audits in accordance with the Australian Auditing Standards and relevant professional and legislative requirements. Additional information about the delivery of our financial audits is in Appendix B.
This section sets out our attest engagement work program for 2021–22. This encompasses reports to Parliament on the results of our financial and performance statement audits of agencies and the number and type of audit opinions we expect to issue.
This section sets out our proposed performance audit program for the next three years. In 2021–22, we plan to deliver 18 performance audits.
For each audit listed, we outline the audit specification, which includes our objective for the audit, the issues we intend to examine and the agencies we expect to include.
As discussed in Section 3.2, most departments' performance statements do not clearly measure their service efficiency and effectiveness. This makes it difficult for them to identify opportunities to improve their operations and demonstrate value for money. We used the Productivity Commission's RoGS to show how departments could restructure their performance information to better monitor their performance over time.
| Who we audited | What we assessed | What the audit cost |
|---|---|---|
| All eight Victorian Government departments | We assessed:
|
| Acronyms | |
|---|---|
| BP3 | Budget Paper No. |
We have consulted DELWP, DET, DFFH, DH, DJCS, DJPR, DoT, DPC and DTF, and we considered their views when reaching our audit conclusions. As required by the Audit Act 1994, we gave a draft copy of this report, or relevant extracts, to those agencies and asked for their submissions and comments.
Responsibility for the accuracy, fairness and balance of those comments rests solely with the agency head.
It is difficult for the government, Parliament and the community to use the results departments publish in BP3 and their annual reports to understand performance. This is due to: