Abstract
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The pre-accession and post-accession process of Romania to the European Union (EU) had and still has an important influence on the institutional framework and on the methodology in which the programs and projects and, broader, the public policies are audited and evaluated in this country. Along with the process of European Union accession (in 1st of January 2007), there is a trend in which Romanian Government is heading towards a budgetary system based on programs, which resulted in visible changes in recent years in the institutional architecture of programs’ audit and evaluations in Romania.
The most important institution that conducts the control of the public expenditure in Romania is the Romanian Court of Accounts. In addition to its core function, to identifying errors and irregularities in the process of public funds execution, a new function was developed in the recent years: the performance audit, which is mainly performed for the European Union financial assistance in Romania.
At the same time, from 2000, the European Commission stipulated that all aspects of its interventions should be evaluated. Prior to Romania’s accession to EU, the evaluations in this country were organized by the European Commission services from Brussels. After the accession and the introduction of the Extended Decentralized Implementation System (EDIS), this responsibility was transferred to the Romanian authorities. The coordinator of this function is the Evaluation Central Unit within the Authority of Coordination of Structural Instruments, which was recently swapped from the Ministry of Public Finance to the General Secretariat of the Government, under the authority of the Prime Minister.
The methodology will employ empirical research of the actual practice of the performance audit and evaluations of the European Union funded Operational Programs in Romania. While the performance audit missions are carried out by the Audit Authority (within the Court of Accounts) the interim and thematic evaluations carried out by independent evaluators (contracted through the Managing Authorities through various consortia). The examination will target the methodologies used in these operations, the institutional settings and the human resources involved.
While performance audit and evaluations of Operational Programs, are fairly new operations in the public management realm in Romania, both gained important practical experience. As the first round of interim evaluation of the Operational Programs within the 2007-2013 framework was completed, and the second round is just starting, we aim to analyze the complementarity of the performance audit and evaluation systems from the perspective of the methodologies employed, the institutional settings, the human resource involved and, the results obtained. Therefore, the paper is trying to examine how the experience gained throughout the performance audit and evaluation carried out after Romania’s accession to the European Union, is generating knowledge for learning for a better implementation of the public programs and public policies.
Key words: performance audit, evaluation, public policy, European Union financial assistance
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