PROPRIETY AUDIT

 Propriety audit - 

• According to ‘propriety audit’, the auditors try to bring out cases of improper, avoidable, or infructuous expenditure even though the expenditure has been incurred in conformity with the existing rules and regulations. With the passage of time, it was felt that regularity audit alone was not sufficient to protect properly the public interest in the spending of money by the executive authorities.
•  A transaction may satisfy all the requirements of regularity audit insofar as the various formalities regarding rules and regulations are concerned, but may still be highly wasteful. A building may be constructed for installing a telephone exchange but may not be used for the same purpose resulting in infructuous expenditure or a school building may be constructed but used after five years of its completion is a case of avoidable expenditure.
• Audit should, therefore, try to secure a reasonably high standard of public financial morality by looking into the wisdom, faithfulness and economy of transactions. These considerations have led to the evolution of audit against propriety which is now being combined by the audit authorities with their routine function of regularity audit. It is hard to frame any precise rules for regulating the course of audit against propriety. 

Such an objective of audit depends for its acceptance on its appeal to the common sense and straight logic of the auditors and of those whose financial transactions are subjected to propriety audit. However, some general principles have been laid down in the Audit Code, which have for long been recognised as standards of financial propriety. Audit against propriety seeks to ensure that expenditure conforms to these principles which have been stated as follows:

(a) The expenditure should not be prima facie more than the occasion demands. Every public officer is expected to exercise the same vigilance in respect of expenditure incurred from public moneys as a person of ordinary prudence would exercise in respect of expenditure of his own money.

(b) No authority should exercise its powers of sanctioning expenditure to pass an order which will be directly or indirectly to its own advantage.

(c) Public moneys should not be utilised for the benefit of a particular person or section of the community unless:

(i) the amount of expenditure involved is insignificant; or

(ii) a claim for the amount could be enforced in a Court of law; or

(iii) the expenditure is in pursuance of a recognised policy or custom; and

(iv) the amount of allowances, such as travelling allowances, granted to meet expenditure of a particular type should be so regulated that the allowances are not, on the whole, sources of profit to the recipients.

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