Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) are classical instruments of the public accountability structure. The aim of this paper is to investigate developments in the role of SAIs in Denmark, Germany and Norway in light of recent reforms. Several researchers have pointed to NPM related reforms of decentralization and agencification as important for understanding developments in SAIs. The argument has been that such reforms necessitate stronger accountability instruments from the central level in order to ensure continued political insight and control (Pollitt et al. 1999, Mundebo and Kjær 1997). We will investigate this claim about an increasing role for SAIs by analyzing SAI reports in the three countries over the past decades. We explore how SAI are reporting on three mayor reform trends, namely increased decentralization, marketization and the performance management systems. We also assess whether there are differences between the Danish, German and Norwegian SAI, and develop hypotheses about the possible reasons for such differences.
Although a number of institutional features of the SAIs differ, we argue that their fundamental roles as accountability institutions regarding conduct of agencies spending public money is similar in all three countries. We can thus treat them as similar case examples and use any differences that we may observe, as the basis for generating hypotheses for further investigation. We select three welfare sectors (employment, immigration services and health care) as critical cases for further investigation as these sectors reflect the tensions and complexities of modern welfare states, that have created pressure for stronger accountability functions (Power 1995, Brandsma and Schillemans 2010). The main expectation is that the role of SAIs in the three countries is expanding both in general and within the sectors, although with some possible variation across sectors and between the three countries due to differences in public sector reform trajectories and political dynamics.
