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Auditing and Accountability for the “Taxpayer’s Money” How is the monitoring work carried out by the National Audit Office in central Copenhagen related to the monitoring work of NatureAid? Among other things, the civil servants, the environmentalists and the people living in and around threatened natural reserves are connected through a flow of documentation through which they seek to account for the progress of development projects. Through multiple procedures and formats, they seek, in their quite different ways, to understand the quality of aid projects and their effects. But there is one central difference. Whereas NGOs such as NatureAid are required to monitor the progress of its own projects, the task of the National Audit Office is to audit these organizations. The National Audit Office provides the final external check on how NGOs spend funds they have received from the Danish state. Recall the argument (made by development consultants) that aid development partnerships are necessarily asymmetrical because donors are first and foremost accountable to their own taxpayers. They must be able to prove that tax money is correctly spent (that is, according to rules) on development projects, and evaluate whether it is spent well. If it isn’t spent correctly, the organizations are breaking Danish laws. And if it isn’t spent well, political and public support for aid expenditure may well dwindle, as it has threatened to do, in Denmark and elsewhere, in recent years.1 For good reasons, donors are not in charge of providing the ultimate evaluation of how well they are doing. That is the task of audit offices. The National Audit Office, therefore, is supposed to be the final link in the “chain of accountability” that guarantees the transparency of aid projects. This “chain” includes non-governmental organization and their partners, funders (such as Danida), and Danish taxpayers. However, as we shall see, auditing “loops” in such a way that to talk about an infrastructural endpoint to it becomes complicated. There really isn’t any “chain” at all. 6 Wormholes: Loops of Auditing and Learning 122 Chapter 6 The National Audit Office is an organizational body of considerably importance and authority. Since it is the final auditing instance, it is incumbent that its audits are objectively correct. Auditing guarantees that public money isn’t squandered. For the same reason, the legitimacy of the National Audit Office is entwined with its ability to make its auditing objective. The National Audit Office’s procedures, however, are themselves enacted in and as an infrastructure of loops between auditors and auditees. These loops put auditors in a position in which, while interacting with the organizations they audit, they must remain detached from them. In this chapter , we argue that the tension between detachment and interaction creates “wormholes” through which auditing passes, mutating as it does so. The National Audit Office Denmark’s National Audit Office has undergone substantial organizational changes since 1986.2 It has halved the number of office workers it employs and increased the number of employees with academic backgrounds, mostly in social science. The mandate of the National Audit Office is to audit the state’s accounts. More specifically, it is to verify that funds are used according to parliamentary decisions. Organizationally, the office reports to the Public Accounts Committee, yet it conducts its tasks independently to ensure impartiality and objectivity. In general terms, the prevalence of audits testifies to the strength of the audit explosion thesis (Power 1994). However, although the National Audit Office appears to be the epitome of external control, its modes of operation create organizational and epistemological frictions that, we suggest, give rise to audit implosion. The more than 250 employees working in the office come from a wide range of backgrounds “reflecting the many tasks that the institution is performing.”3 These tasks include forms of auditing that go considerably beyond traditional evaluations of accounts and budgets (which of course remain central). “Auditing in many ways”4 is the expression used to describe these activities on the office’s homepage. Carrying out these diverse tasks involves addressing questions such as what should be audited and where, as well as questions about the use of methods and interpretation of data. The variety of critical decisions that must be made before and during an audit provided us with an initial sense that, although the office is committed to an ideal of procedural objectivity, this ideal co-exists with a far more mixed and diffuse sense of obligation to assist organizations and help...

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