Financial or performance auditing? : the role of elected auditors in Swedish municipalities

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to see if the elected auditors in the Swedish municipalities focus more on financial or on performance auditing in the audit report. This is a very important question today in the public sector because of the change in the elected auditor’s duties and responsibility. The public organizations management and accounting today are influenced by the private sector; therefore there must be a change in the elected auditor’s role in the public organization. The investigation was done by going through the audit reports of the municipalities of Sweden. The factors looked at were connected to both financial auditing and performance auditing and public management and accounting. Besides looking for factors, the number of words connected to each factor was counted. Since we only received audit reports from 232 out of 290 municipalities, our result is a little skewed representing the larger municipalities.The results from this study is that there is significantly more information concerning financial auditing rather than performance auditing in the audit report in the municipalities of Sweden. Also the political majority has no effect on the content of the audit report, nor do the political parties affect the amount of information concerning financial or performance auditing. The study also shows that the use of professional auditors in the municipalities can affect the content of the audit reports, both when it comes to financial and performance auditing.