Benefits and challenges of risk-based audit implementation at federal education institutions

Abstract

The Brazilian public administration have experienced several reforms to improve government organization and management. Among these, The Management Reform allowed to pursue efficiency, performance-based management and tasks decentralization. Hence, internal controls shifted from focusing on the formalism of the acts to conducting public activities through the evaluation of the achievement of objectives and the risk management of public organizations in a decentralized manner by internal audit units, called Risk Based Audit (ABR). In that regard, some federal institutions of education (IFES) have adopted this methodology, however, no studies explored the impacts of performing this approach or, the best way to develop the process. Thus, the aim of this paper is to identify the benefits and challenges in the implementation of ABR in IFES. The data were obtained through a survey that was applied to internal auditors of the IFES and statistically treated using the factorial analysis technique to identify groups of benefits and challenges in the implementation of ABR. By extracting factors of ABR, the research showed that two factors represent benefits and three factors describe challenges in the implementation of ABR.