Debate: auditing and political accountability in local government - dealing with paradoxes in the relationship between the executive and the council

Abstract

This article addresses the role of external auditing in enhancing accountability in local government, building upon several paradoxes that result from the political relationship between elected bodies. It takes the example of Portuguese municipalities.

In local governments, the council scrutinizes and inspects the general activity and financial management of the executive, censuring where necessary, and supervising the overall performance of the local management (CEMR, Citation2016). The local authority budget, the main instrument of local policy, must be approved by the council. The executive is then responsible for implementing it and is accountable through the annual accounts. In this (internal) accountability process, statutory external auditors play an important role in ensuring fair presentation, assuring the reliability of the information reported (Maclean, Citation2014; Nogueira & Jorge, Citation2017).

The Portuguese reporting framework includes both financial and budgetary requirements and statements. Consequently, the external auditor has to express an opinion on whether the financial statements are prepared, in all material respects, in accordance with the applicable financial reporting framework. Furthermore, they also have to state that the public entity complied with the requirements for the budgetary execution and statements, according to what is set out in the Portuguese public sector budget and accounting standards (Jorge et al., Citation2022). A weakness in this system is that the electoral process for both the executive and the council can interfere with the auditor’s role. For example, in Portuguese municipalities, both the council (‘Assembleia Municipal’) and the executive (‘Câmara Municipal’) are directly elected and allocated through the d’Hondt proportional representation voting method (Law 1/2001). Consequently, although the mayor (like the council chair) is the candidate who received the most votes, they do not choose the municipality’s management team, because both the executive and the council can include opposing party members with their own political agenda.

Therefore, while contributing to improving accountability in the political relationship between the council and the executive, and among their members, the statutory external auditor may face a number of paradoxes.

Although these paradoxes are considered in this article taking the case of Portugal, they apply to other countries, and are particularly striking in contexts where the local authority’s management bodies include members of opposing political parties.