Vietnam expects to be able to conduct performance-based audits, which survey efficiency and effectiveness, in the next five years.
Utilising performance auditing is integral to the country's action plan and implementing auditing development strategies by 2020. These plans were discussed at a conference held by the State Audit of Vietnam in Hanoi on Nov. 10.
It is a very ambitious but essential move," said Dr Trinh Tien Dung, a former assistant resident representative at the United Nations Development Programme in Vietnam.
Performance auditing is the most difficult type of auditing because it assesses organisation's activities to see if resources are being effectively managed.
Auditors at the State Audit of Vietnam were able to perform financial statement auditing and compliance auditing, but not performance auditing, said deputy head of the country's key auditing agency Le Minh Khai.
Performance auditing was important because other types of auditing were not enough to provide accurate assessments, said Khai.
This type of auditing was very difficult to conduct because it required additional training for auditors and a set of standards must be established before they were implemented, added the independent consultant.
A road map was needed to introduce performance auditing in Vietnam, especially because the country had not has an ample amount of experience with managing auditing agencies, said Khai.
There were not enough auditors in Vietnam and most of them were not competent enough to work at their full capacity, he said.
State Audit of Vietnam employs 1,000 auditors and more than half of them have less than five years of work experience.
Most donors hired foreign auditing companies based in Vietnam to audit the programmes that they funded, said Dung.
The agency aims to implement a legal framework that supports auditing activities by amending the State Audit Law and relevant legislation.
It will hire 200 auditors a year during the next decade and hope to have 3,500 auditors by 2020.
The agency is supervised by the National Assembly./.
