Accountability and financial audit of the national security services

One of the biggest challenges that the states encounter with is to ensure the balance between security and freedom. In democratic states, public institutions are required to be accountable to the public and transparent, however since transparency and accountability are considered to be a threat for national security, it is not applied properly or not applied at all at intelligence services. Within this framework, in the thesis, oversight, audit and accountability of the intelligence public service carried out for the purpose of national security have been determined as the field of study. In the study, it has been attempted to depict how intelligence services are supervised and observed in democratic states through the literature, studies performed by international institutions and country examples. It is seen that the actors such as senior managers, executive, judicial, legislation, ombudsman, supreme audit institutions, media and civil society play a part in the activity of the audit and oversight of intelligence services. In this scope, the duties and functions as well as the supervision and surveillance mechanisms of intelligence services in United States of America, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Norway, Germany and Turkey have been analyzed. By taking into consideration the intelligence budgets of the countries chosen, performance measurements such as efficiency and effectiveness have been tried to be revealed with the method of depictive analysis and multidimensional scaling. Nevertheless, the similarities and differences between the selected countries for 2012-2017 have been identified by statistical data regarding the intelligence expenses are included in the analyses made, and. In addition to these, a model for how accountability, audit and oversight of intelligence public service for our country should be has been suggested.