Whether it worked
Who the auditor is watching.
- 01the forecastimpact assessments
- 02the verdict on itRPC opinions
- 03the review, years onpost-implementation reviews
- 04the independent audityou are here
The National Audit Office goes through government's books and says in public whether the money did what it was meant to. This is everything it has published — and which bodies it has never looked at.
More about this source
Since — the NAO has published — reports. — of them — — — are value-for-money studies: the ones with findings, recommendations and a department on the receiving end. Another — are the auditor's opinions on a set of accounts, published every year whether or not there is anything to say. — are interactive data tools.
That is roughly — reports a month, or one every — days, across — topics.
The attention is not spread evenly.
— departments, agencies and other public bodies are named on at least one of these reports. The most-audited of them, —, appears on — — — of everything published in the period.
The NAO keeps its own index of every body it has ever reported on: — of them. — have had nothing at all since —. That is — of the list — bodies with a back catalogue at the NAO and no entry in the current one.
This is stage four of Whether it worked, and the only one where the answer does not come from the department itself. The forecast was written by the department; the verdict on that forecast only covers what was sent for marking; the review five years on is the department marking its own work. The rest of the site sits alongside: what government is asking about, what it says it will do, what it tells you to do and what it discloses about itself.
Who gets audited
The auditor's attention, body by body.
Each bar is one department, agency or public body, busiest first. The lime part is how much of that attention was a value-for-money study rather than a signature on the accounts.
value-for-money studies audit opinions and everything else
Click a body to filter the source below. A report can name more than one body, so the bars add up to more than the source.
And the quiet half.
The bars above only show bodies that appear. The more useful list is the one that doesn't: parts of government the NAO has reported on before, sometimes many times, with nothing at all since —.
A gap is not a clean bill of health, and it is not an accusation either. The NAO picks its own value-for-money programme, and a body with a modest budget and no recent trouble rarely wins the argument for a slot. Some names on the list have also been abolished or merged since their last report, and their back catalogue stays in the index under the old name — so check what a body still is before reading much into its silence.
What the list is good for is the question it puts to anyone planning work in an area: when did somebody independent last look at this, and what did they find?
The source
Every report, with who it was about.
Describe what you do and the source narrows to your subject. Or search the text, filter by the kind of report, the body audited, the topic and the year.