Analysis and State Audit of Public Procurement: The Criteria of Effectiveness

Public procurement in Ukraine was and, unfortunately, remains one of the main areas of corruption abuse at all levels of government; as a result, the state suffers significant financial losses. Therefore, the state external financial audit, which is carried out by the Accounts Chamber of Ukraine, is an important component of the public procurement control system. Checking the effectiveness of public procurement is a rather complicated procedure, because effectiveness can be evaluated in different ways. The purpose of the article is to reveal the essence of the concept of “performance audit” from the standpoint of the implementation of control functions by the subjects of audit. The comparative analysis of the state audit forms was carry out. The conceptual models for increasing the efficiency of state institutions were systematized. It was determined that the issues of performance audit of public procurement may include: general issues (strategic (pragmatic), current, industry, social, environmental) that are used to assess the effectiveness of the public procurement process at the level of customers and participants; individual questions used to assess the effectiveness of an individual purchase at the level of any customer. It was revealed that the performance audit of public procurement as a component of state external financial control provides for verification on the basis of such criteria as: thrift, effectiveness, successfulness. The object of the performance audit is all types of resources (budget funds, state property, labor resources), as well as the mechanism for their transformation into a final product (service). The optimization of transformation mechanism is the most important task of performance audit. It was proved that the assessment of overall effectiveness is impossible without the existence of additional criteria and their integrated application with basic ones. The authors propose the following additional criteria: the timeliness, quality, expediency of public procurement. These criteria have a significant impact on the financial and social aspects of the further use of goods and services purchased through public procurement at the expense of state or local budgets, and therefore must be taken into account when conducting performance audit.