What are the methods of effectiveness auditing?

(i) Interviews. Interview is one of the commonly used methods in efficiency auditing and can be applied to every stage of the audit process. The auditor can prepare a series of questions in advance according to the needs of the work and communicate with them through direct interviews or telephone calls, and the interviews can be individual interviews or multi-person discussion-style interviews. For example, the Stockholm Provincial Audit Office used interviews when conducting an efficiency audit of hospital services. The interviews included issues such as patient satisfaction, length of waiting time in queues and development of medical care. The interviews were conducted with patients, their families and service personnel, and the interviews led to the preliminary conclusion that medical services were poor.

(ii) The use of experts and social audit power. Sweden's national audit institutions are generally not many people, and efficiency audits involve a wide range of auditors can not have all the relevant knowledge and skills, so the Swedish audit department to take the way is to hire external experts as consultants or short-term employment of some personnel, and sometimes even some of the projects handed over to the social auditing or consulting firms to undertake. Each year, the national audit offices in Stockholm's provinces and municipalities spend more than 10 percent of their budgets on audits using external resources.

(iii) Questionnaires. A questionnaire survey is a form with a series of targeted, patterned questions designed as needed to collect information and evidence by distributing it to the target group being surveyed. For example, the Stockholm City Audit Office, in its audit of satisfaction with private schools, designed a questionnaire that included questions such as: how satisfied are you with the school, do you feel pressured at the school, would you recommend a friend's child to come to this school, how safe is the school, etc. The questionnaire also included questions that parents had to answer in order for the school to be safe. These questions were designed to be answered by parents, students, and teachers. Since these questions require only a "yes" or "no" answer, the design of the questionnaire questions is the key to the success of the survey.

(d) Review and study of documents. Benefit audit not only to study the financial information, but also to review and study the relevant statistical reports, official reports and the audited unit's internal documents and materials. The Swedish auditing authorities have basically encountered no difficulties in reviewing documents and materials, but in the efficiency audit of hospitals, there is also the problem that some doctors are reluctant to provide medical records because of patients' privacy rights.

(v) Observation. Observation means that the auditor visits the workplace of the audited organization or the site where the audited matter takes place in order to understand the functioning of the activity in question, to understand the thoughts of the employees at the site, and to compare them with the information obtained through other methods. For example, the Stockholm City Audit Office, in its audit to determine who is eligible for social security benefits, went to the basic distribution units of the benefits to measure the criteria for distribution of the benefits, to check the steps for determining the benefits, to observe whether the internal control system was functioning and to cross-monitor the scope of work and the competence of each department through the network. Observation is a very effective audit method for benefit audits when written documents from management are the only source of information.

(vi) Organization and prediction of data and information. In the efficiency audit, the Swedish audit department usually adopts some technical methods to organize and forecast the collected data, some of the forecasting methods are common, such as correlation analysis, regression analysis and time series analysis, and some of them are special tools. In addition, quantitative rating scales can be designed for data analysis. For example, the Swedish Audit Office used rating scales to evaluate the overall service capacity of hospitals in their hospital efficiency audits. But in the audit, they also found that the comprehensive score sheet has its limitations, that is, the scoring criteria are not applicable to every hospital.