A Recommended Strategic Model to Change the Audit Process of the State Audit Office of Vietnam

Abstract

The audit process of the State Audit Office of Vietnam (SAV) has inherent limitations and weaknesses that need to be addressed in order to keep pace with the development of the SAV. This paper aims to improve the SAV to meet international auditing standards of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It will use the Australian Government audit process as a direct comparison in order to identify issues in the change management processes required for the SAV and to propose a methodology to resolve these issues. Although research methodology focused on semi-structured indepth individual interviews, document review was used to supplement the overall data. The research findings indicate agreement over previous attempts by the literature review. These findings suggested that the change management process may face various issues arising from personal barriers to the change, the SAV culture, application of technology to auditing, costs for the change, the SAV auditor human resource quality and training, and the SAV organizational and operational model. The proposed strategic framework to resolve these issues addressed removing personal barriers to the change, improving infrastructure, human resource, training and legal framework of the SAV, and implementing changes in the SAV culture. These outcomes may assist the SAV in providing the proposed recommendation for the strategic model to change the audit process of the SAV.