Auditing

Broadly defined, auditing is a procedure in which an independent third party systematically examines the evidence of adherence of some practice to a set of norms or standards for that practice and issues a professional opinion. For several years, this general idea has informed the process of metaevaluation—a third-party evaluator examines the quality of a completed evaluation against some set of standards for evaluation. In addition to this generic way of thinking about the nature of auditing and its relevance for evaluation, more specifically, one can examine the relations between the practices of program evaluation and program and performance auditing at state and national levels. For many years, these activities have existed side by side as distinct practices with different [Page 24]professional cultures, literatures, and ...