عملکرد حسابرسی داخلی، تاثیر کمیته های حسابرسی و مسئولیت پذیری در شرکت های قانونی اوگاندا Internal Audit Function, Audit Committees’ Effectiveness and Accountability in the Ugandan Statutory Corporations

Introduction and motivation The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution of internal audit function and audit committees’ effectiveness on accountability in Statutory Corporations (SCs) in Uganda in a single study. Accountability of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) (also known as statutory corporations in some jurisdictions) is a crucial and growing topic in public management. In their guest editorial, Grossi, Papenfuß and Tremblay (2015), exemplify the importance of SCs but lament the scant empirical studies available on the topic. Yet in Uganda, for example, the Auditor General (AG) has for a number of years lamented and discovered accountability failures in this country. Thus, questions continue to abound about which models, mechanisms, instruments and processes SCs could employ for effective, efficient and sustainable accountability. According to Brennan and Solomon (2008) board composition, existence and performance of audit committees, external audit, institutional investors and functioning of internal audit can explain variances in accountability. However, according to Khongmalai, Tang and Siengthai (2010) most studies have focused on the private sector rather than the SCs’ sector, and focused on only one practice of corporate governance. For example, the board of directors or governing boards (Michie and Oughton, 2001; Nkundabanyanga, et al., 2015), internal control (Giroux and McLelland, 2003), internal audit (Xie et al., 2003), or risk management (Crawford and Stein, 2004). Except for the study of Khongmalai, Tang and Siengthai (2010), whose study’s value lay in the demonstration of the multi-attribute nature of the corporate governance model in SOEs in Thailand, to our knowledge, there is no study that has empirically tested the role of internal audit function and audit committee effectiveness in explaining accountability in the SCs, in a single study. Initially, we reason that since one of the audit committee roles is to review corporate accounting information and yet also internal audit must evaluate and contribute to improvement of internal controls, internal audit function and audit committee effectiveness should hybridize in order to obtain better accountability. Like in purely private corporations, this is possible in the SCs because King III (2009) has for instance introduced a combined assurance model that considers internal assurance units (e.g. internal and audit committee functions) as one of the three lines of defense along with management and external assurance providers. Within the context of accountability on the African scene, King III (2009) requires internal assurance mechanisms such as the audit committee function to ensure the integrity of financial disclosures considered one of the accountability mechanisms. Similarly, the government of Uganda enacted the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) in 2015 which requires every government agency to have an internal audit function. Theoretically, because SCs are run by individuals with private interests yet such corporations are public in nature, we expect that to reduce the risk of principals (the public/ tax payers) making adverse judgements on the agent’s likelihood to pursue the principal’s interests, management of SCs are likely to seek the services of an internal auditor.