An Evaluation of the Transparency in the Inspection Practices of the Turkish Government Auditing Units over General Budget Institutions

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the transparency problem of public auditing for general budget institutions in Turkey. In this study, transparency in the auditing operations of 47 general budget institutions was studied by searching the institutions’ web sites. Upon examination, it is seen that the general practice in these public organizations is to keep the audit reports and activity reports of the audit committees keep away from public access. Only exceptions to this general tendency are the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre. These institutions open some of their audit reports and unit operation reports to the public. In regard to internal audit units, public organizations follow even more strict closeness. They do not share directly with the public the unit activity reports and audit reports but send them as a legal obligation to the Internal Audit Coordination Board. The public institutions which have been subject to external auditing also do not share the external auditing results. The internal inspection units of institutions send their reports to Internal Audit Coordination Board as a legal obligation. However, Turkish Court of Accounts has begun to publish its audit reports since December 2013. The results of the study point out that transparent auditing system could have not been constructed for fiscal management up to now. Turkish public auditing system need to be redesigned by legal modifications and institutional adjustments and it is suggested that new structure should include the boards of inspection. In order to improve the transparency and accountability of the administration and the auditing system, a convenient legal environment need to created. In addition to all these, it is remembered that fairness and transparency in auditing and its implementation in an efficient way require compatible changes in administrative and institutional mentality.