Efficacy of Top down audits and Community Monitoring

In this paper we survey the recent literature on top down audits and community monitoring. While in the case of top down audits the efficacy of audits depends on the type of punishment- electoral punishment vs legal punishment, the literature finds that electoral punishment is less effective than legal punishment. Moreover, electoral punishment depends on whether voters are aware of audit reports. The type of service being audited - the opportunity for corruption and the clarity of rules and regulations effect the success of audits. However, even when top down audits succeed in cutting down corruption, they may not always lead to better outcomes. Social audits are effective when collective action problems are less salient e.g. when groups are homogeneous, when the design is such that community participants feel empowered e.g. through elections to the monitoring committee, information is not useful by itself unless accompanied by tools to influence outcomes, and finally there is not a clear map between finding corruption and improving ultimate outcomes. We suggest that a fertile area for future research is the design of optimal audit schemes that take account of the opportunities for corruption and the motivations of both the providers and the auditors.