Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose As practised by Auditors General in governmental organizations, the value for money (VFM) audit is ultimately destined to improve the management of public affairs. This study aims to examine to what extent Auditor General of Quebec has been achieving this objective through the VFM audits conducted in the Canadian province of Quebec from 1995 to 2002. For the purposes of this research, a model was designed that measured the impact these VFM audits may have had on the management of the organizations audited and that exposed the determinants of this impact. Design/methodology/approach A survey was sent out exclusively to auditees who are the representatives of the organizations audited: top and middle managers and department professionals (specialists in their area: health, education, etc.) having interacted with the auditors during VFM audits. A five‐category Likert‐type scale was selected for the survey. A total of 188 questionnaires were sent out and, of the questionnaires filled out by auditees, a total of 99 were considered valid, that is 53 percent response rate. Quantitative analysis was performed using SPSS software. For each of the elements measuring the impact of VFM audits on the management of organizations audited, principal components factor analysis (with VARIMAX rotation when there was more than one factor) was performed. These analyses sought to understand the correlation structure of the variables for each of the elements. Findings The changes made after the auditors' visits have not been radical and there have been no revolutions in the organizations audited, but the influence of auditors is perceptible for all ten of the elements measured. The will of those at the base of the organization and the intervention of parliamentarians turn out to have a decisive influence on the impact that auditors will or will not have on the management of organizations audited. Research limitations/implications The point of view reported is exclusively that of auditees. There can be no claim for total objectivity on their part. Moreover, it was practically impossible to corroborate their statements with other sources. Some respondents might have tended to minimize the influence that auditors might have had on them. Others could have shaped facts to their advantage. Originality/value Measurement of the impact of VFM audits on the management of government organizations, from auditees' point of view, has not been much examined by scholars. This research constitutes a major contribution to advance knowledge about the impact of VFM audits in a Canadian context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".