Auditors General Editing and Proofreading Services

An audit office has only one asset, and it is the credibility of its reports. It has no budget to direct, no programme to run and no power to compel a department to act — what it has is the expectation that when it says something went wrong, the finding will hold. That expectation is destroyed slowly, by reports that overstate, that use adjectives where evidence would do, or that recommend improvements so general no one can be held to them. It is also destroyed by reports nobody reads, which is the more common failure.

We edit what audit offices and their teams produce — performance and value-for-money audit reports, financial audit findings and management letters, chapter drafts for tabling in a legislature, executive summaries and highlight documents, audit criteria and methodology sections, entity responses and follow-up assessments, special examinations of crown corporations and public bodies, annual reports and strategic plans for the office itself, practice guidance and methodology manuals for audit staff, briefing material for public accounts committees, media releases and public-facing summaries, and follow-up reports on previously issued recommendations. Our editors check that every finding is traceable to stated criteria and evidence, and that the language stays measured where the facts are already damning enough.

The recommendation is where audit reports most often fail their own purpose. A finding can be excellent and the recommendation that follows it — that the department "strengthen its oversight framework" or "improve monitoring of programme outcomes" — cannot be implemented, cannot be refused, and cannot be assessed as complete two years later. We rewrite recommendations so each names the entity responsible, the specific action, and the observable state that will exist when it is done: not "improve data quality", but "reconcile the beneficiary register against the payment system quarterly and report exceptions to the deputy minister". We keep the number of recommendations low, because a chapter carrying nineteen of them signals that the office could not decide what mattered, and departments triage accordingly. And we ensure the recommendation follows from the finding rather than from the audit team's view of how the programme should be run — the boundary that, once crossed, gives the entity its easiest response.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including draft chapters before tabling and material subject to parliamentary privilege or embargo. We are editors rather than auditors, and we offer no view on findings, criteria or conclusions — the audit judgement remains entirely yours. What we can do is make the reports precise, readable by legislators and journalists, and consistent across a large annual publication programme.