Effectiveness of government audit in ensuring accountability of clients in Zanzibar

Abstract

The purpose of the study was assessed the effectiveness of government audit to ensure accountability of the clients in Zanzibar. The study was focused on assessing the contribution of government audit in managing public resources are responsibly and effectively, assessing the oversight functions of government entities, examining the role of Government audit in minimizing the chances of misuse and mismanage public resource and assess the reliability to the financial statement opinion provided by the government auditors to the intended users. This study adopted the multi embedded case study design and employed qualitative and descriptive statistics. A population of 121 was selected from External and Internal Auditors, Accountants, Director of Audit and Senior Officers from Ministry of Finance and House of Representatives using stratified simple random sampling. The study found that there is little contribution of government audit in managing public resources are responsibly and effectively to achieve the intended result, the due to fact that Government auditors have not fully covered the audit mandate, often some of the government auditors are not abide with the code of ethics, Public Account Committee faces some challenges on exercising their duties which include lack of skills that can cover all aspects ranging from information technology, financial management and public administration, also operate within a limited budget, increases workload and backlogs and the power of PAC in Zanzibar is limited to making recommendations to the House of Representative, most common type of audit approach is vouching audit and there is lack of autonomy in term of finance and employee, under the reliability of financial statement opinion the study showed that some of the audit staffs have no familiar with application of standards and improper planning during the audit work. The study recommends that various strategies that can be employed to address the above challenges. Such strategies include; repeals of the Establishment of Office of the Controller and Auditor General Act number 11 of 2003, revised some of the provision of the Constitution of Zanzibar of 1984 and continuous capacitate of government auditors and PAC through training on the auditing matters.