Outsourcing internal audit services : an empirical study on Queensland public-sector entities

A study of Queensland public-sector entities suggests outsourcing of internal audit services to be extensive (88%), with 51% of respondent agencies adopting co-sourcing and 37% of the agencies fully outsourcing. Results suggest that internal audit outsourcing is largely adopted for non-financial reasons such as lack of technological know-how and service quality rather than financial reasons. Deficiencies of current governance arrangements concerning internal audit outsourcing include (1) a lack of audit committee involvement in outsourcing processes, particularly in co-sourcing entities, and (2) inadequate segregation of duties whereby the same senior management is involved in key arrangements including selection, approval, negotiation and evaluation of contractual performance.<br /

Patient violence, physicians treatment decisions, and patient welfare: Evidence from China

Although violence in healthcare settings has become a common occurrence worldwide, there is limited evidence on the spillover effects of patient violence on physicians' medical decisions. Utilizing microdata on inpatients from a major public hospital, we investigated how extreme patient violence—the murder of a physician in China—affected physicians' treatment decisions and patient welfare in a hospital geographically distant from the murder site. By matching this patient dataset to physician profiles, we performed a difference-in-differences analysis in which the treatment group comprised patients admitted shortly before and after the murder shock, and the control group consisted of patients admitted during the same months in the previous year. Immediately after the shock, the provision of medical treatment was notably higher, with a 16.9% increase in the number of surgeries and a 9.5% increase in the treatment expenditures. However, patient health outcomes were worse, with an increased mortality rate of 0.9% points. Findings suggest that patient violence dramatically changed physician behavior, causing negative consequences on patients even when the healthcare workers were not direct victims of patient violence.</p

Project bank accounts: the second wave of security of payment?

Project bank accounts: the second wave of security of payment

Reducing the compliance burden of nonprofit organisations: cutting red tape

Australian governments now rely on the non-profit sector to provide essential services. Yet, anecdotally, the compliance burden imposed by governments consumes scarce service delivery resources. This study quantifies the cost of government generated paperwork for Queensland non-profit organisations. Fourteen non-profits kept logs to record government paperwork over 12 months. The non-profits also provided their experiences of government paperwork and in particular grant submission and reporting processes. The study finds that government grant paperwork forms the bulk of a non-profits total paperwork burden with grant submissions being the most costly to complete. Costs are clearly regressive with small non-profits bearing a significantly higher burden. Governments need to lead the way and empower the non-profit sector by reducing this administrative burden and releasing the funds for direct service provision