Audit reforms in turkish public administration and the impact of public employees ' audit perceptions on their performance: The case of Kastamonu province

Management as a concept is encountered wherever efforts are made to achieve any purpose, and the concept of auditing reveals itself as one of the basic functions of management. Therefore, an audit mechanism is required everywhere the management exists. It is impossible to talk about the effectiveness of a management approach that lacks control. Effective audit methods are scientific, cooperative, and capable of revealing talents, democratic, flexible and compliant. Efficient audit methods make significant contributions to the development of public ethical understanding and democracy by paving the way for the management to conduct its activities under the umbrella of openness, transparency and accountability. One of the important changes in our country in recent years is the development plans and reformist implementations within the framework of the European Union acquis, which started to be implemented in the light of the neoliberal public policies, especially in the early 80s, with the effect of the financial crisis which manifested itself in many countries in the form of external debt increase and budget deficits. In order to evaluate the direction of this change in management and to reveal its reliability, contemporary approaches have begun to be adopted in auditing systems. The main objective of this study is to determine the role and place of auditing in public administration in the Turkish public administration framework and to reveal the impacts of the changes on the business performance of the public sector. Based on this objective, the relationship between the audit perceptions of the employees of public administrations who are constantly being audited in Kastamonu province and their work performances were examined. This study has two aspects: theoretical and practical. As is known, although purely qualitative studies or studies conducted through literature review provide important information, there is little chance of making predictions, planning or seeing results numerically by means of these studies. Therefore, the findings obtained in the application section of the study may contribute to the researchers in various ways, as well as how much control mechanisms have been affected by the transformation process in public administration and the effectiveness of the audit within the framework of the current changes in public control will be questioned. As a matter of fact, it is thought that knowing this situation will provide concrete contributions to the literature on public administration. Verbal discussions and applied (empirical) studies are mainly found in the literature related to the subject. The studies conducted in the theoretical context can be said to be predominant. The studies on the scale of verbal discussion are usually aimed at explaining, defining new public administration concepts and, accordingly, new control mechanisms. The literature in Turkish is very rich in this subject and covers many studies on the subject. In the foreign literature, theoretical analyses on the applicability of Public Reform and the resistance of bureaucracy to change has been found, as each country's own public audit devices may be different. Substantial applied (empirical) studies have been found in the literature. On the other hand, in the studies conducted, a questionnaire was applied generally to determine the perceptions of the 'auditing' group. The findings, information and analyses put forward by this study on the perceptions of the audited group are accepted to make an important contribution to the public administration literature.