The Commission of Audit (CA) and the Union of Associations of Professional Accountants (UAPAM) jointly organized the Seminar on Performance Audit and the Operation of Institutions, which took place on the morning of April 19, at the Tourism Activities Centre. The deputy director of China National Audit Office’s Department of Non-profit Government Agencies Audit, Chang Li, the director of the Audit Bureau of CA, Neoh Hwai Beng, the adviser at the Commissioner of Audit Office Lai Iam Moi, the deputy chairman of the board of directors of UAPAM, Vong Hou Piu, and Kanus Yue, an experienced auditor, presented communications on the theme.

In his opening speech, the Commissioner of Audit Ho Veng On said that Macau has entered a new phase of its development, which generates an ever-growing workload to the government, and as a consequence CA must be more and more self-demanding in fulfilling the supervision duties and also in carrying out audit works in a realistic manner and in pace with the changes. Ho Veng On said the audit suggestions presented to the auditees, by means of releasing the respective performance audit reports publicly, are formulated on the basis of effectiveness, efficiency and economy, which would make the implementation of the government policies more transparent and improve the operations of institutions and public departments, which, in turn, would increase the effectiveness of the government policies. The Commissioner of Audit also referred that more researches and studies on other issues of performance audit would be conducted in an approach that brings together theory and practice, so that the ensuing results could be incorporated into the CA’s annual activities plan.

The chairman of UAPAM, Chui Sai Cheong, underlined in his speech that auditing works bring up suggestions that are constructive and innovative to both public and private sectors and for this reason he wished that experts and professionals from China National Audit Office, Commission of Audit of Macau and from the local accounting profession could fully use the opportunity provided by the seminar to exchange ideas and information, both on the theoretical and practice levels.

The communications presented in the seminar were dedicated to the following themes: “Strengthen the application of performance audit on public departments in order to improve governance”, “Introduction to performance audit”, “Performance audit — theory and practice”, “Trends and development of performance audit techniques” and ”To increase audit efficiency by using data analysis instruments”. 250 representatives from public departments, members of UAPAM and staff of the Audit Bureau exchanged point of views and information on the issues discussed in the communications, which significantly promoted the role and importance of performance audit for improving public governance and operation of institutions.