Does increasing auditors' independence lead to more forceful public auditing? A study of a Canadian internal audit reform
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The value of auditing as an instrument of accountability depends upon the independence of auditors. However, the extent to which auditors feel free to review the operation, compliance, and performance of public programs and objectively communicate findings to stakeholders has rarely been assessed. A Canadian public service reform in 2006 introduced institutional safeguards to bolster the independence of departmental internal auditors, but left legislative auditors working for the Auditor General's Office (i.e., Canada's Supreme Audit Institution) unaffected. We analyze and compare 2677 audit reports written by internal and legislative auditors before and after the reform. After the reform, the language used by internal auditors became more assertive and evaluative, but not more critical. This suggests that the safeguards had a meaningful impact on how auditors perform their accountability function but that factors other than independence may be driving their willingness to be more adversarial and critical when communicating audit findings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it