The economic transformations that the Cuban economy is receiving from the economic resolution of the V Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, force the insertion of Cuban products and services in the world market, characterized by the scarcity of natural resources and their increase in cost, the existing high competitive level, the emergence of large economic blocs with power centers that control political power and with a military-industrial complex that allows them to use force to impose their policies and models.
In order to compete in these disadvantages, it requires the existence of an efficient, functional and highly competitive administrative system. Hence the need to have a methodology that allows us to evaluate the elements of management and detect problems that prevent the entity from working well in general and the degree to which each area, department or individual affects deficiencies.
The integral evaluation is a new approach within the modern administrative culture that consists of implanting, using and developing methods and techniques that objectively reflect the real level of the administration and the situation of the company.
Consequently, Management Audit emerges as the driving force behind constructive control and the best management of business activities, where the auditor or the team of auditors who carry it out must be agents of change, and in turn, protagonists with executives and staff. of the company, for the achievement of the highest quality management. Likewise, control plays an important role because without it, the rest of the steps of the process are not significant, so in addition, the audit goes hand in hand with the administration, as an integral part of the administrative process and not as another science independent of the administration itself.
Management Audit is a fundamental tool to measure and evaluate the correct use of resources through universal indicators such as effectiveness, efficiency and economy. It is necessary as a tool that allows to expose the deficiencies that produce negative effects on the management of the entities, quantify the administrative errors that are being made and determine the causes that originate it in order to be able to correct them effectively, generating in the company a healthy dynamism that successfully leads her towards the proposed goals.
The State Finance Committee, the governing body of the Audit in Cuba in the 1980s, sets out as a work objective to carry out audits to the elaboration of the plans that allow diagnosing the suitability or otherwise, of what is executed due to the needs it has. the company to be efficient. This work being one of the antecedents of the Management Audit in Cuba.
At the beginning of the 90s, Management Audit began to boom as a result of social development, technological advancement and productive practice, which contributes to the opening of our relationships towards a world that until then had been little explored in the country and in Since it has become necessary to act, since then workshops and other means of dissemination and promotion of this work have been promoted.
It is based on the idea that designing and applying a Management Audit will allow:
- Integrally elevate the control of human, financial and material resources in a sustainable development. Promote the advance towards the goals of these vital sectors in the development of the population. Encourage senior management to dedicate their time to functions that by their nature are non-delegable..Promote the development of management audits in our society.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Management Audits that are carried out are still insufficient. In these first audits, the managers of the companies do not recognize in this, an ally in the achievement of the objectives that they must meet. Auditors see and are seen as the "fraud and error seekers" of old paradigms. It is evident that there is a time lag between the economic and social changes that are promoted and the development of the Management Audit. According to specialists from the Ministry of Audit and Control and Administrative, they consider as fundamental causes ((MR López Toledo, 2001))
1. Lack of knowledge of the executives about this audit and its advantages. The most modern management styles, in which Cuba is immersed, seek the shortest possible distance between top management and the base. This implies a high level of disaggregation and this is where Management Audit helps executives, ensuring compliance with economic, social and ecological objectives so that management dedicates its time to non-delegable tasks. However, there is a divorce between those management styles and the Management Audit. The first is taken and the second is discarded. As a result, executives are overloaded with work, which prevents them from achieving the expected results.
2. Little methodological support. Although Management Audit is dynamic, it needs a conceptual framework in which the auditor can work. There is still insufficient information or guidelines that allow the auditor, based on them, to carry out their work in a creative but systematic and orderly manner. In our research and considering the importance that certain organisms have in the territory, whether due to their impact on foreign exchange earnings, tourism, or the population, agriculture, work guides have been developed to promote the transfer of these novel technologies. that promote the change that modifies the current situation and contributes to a better understanding of this audit both by auditors and by all the personnel who benefit from it.
3. Insufficiency of auditors to break their paradigms. It is known to all that scientific knowledge constitutes the high-level support of all impetuous development. It is very difficult for it to be carried out by people who do not master its characteristics and properties and who in turn provide improvements and improvements. Human resources are a key factor in technological development. Auditors are not fully prepared for change, they are overwhelmed by the traditional audit routine.
4. Inability of teamwork to achieve high scientific productivity. In Management Audit, as already explained, several disciplines are needed to obtain a description and understanding of the object to be studied. Interdisciplinarity rests on the material unity of the world and responds to a need for scientific activity linked to social practice. In the case of this type of audit, it becomes an essential requirement where organic cooperation between team members must be achieved.. In many of the audits carried out in the territory this is not achieved, and the auditor is sometimes limited to consulting with other specialists.
Also time conspires against the effectiveness of the results that are detected because after a period of not less than 6 months has elapsed, what has been detected cannot be solved or is not worth solving. Well, it is intended to cover all the activities in the companies without realizing that the success in the Management Audit is in identifying the critical area of the entity, so an exhaustive analysis must be made to detect the problems themselves, their causes and recommendations, in no time.
To fulfill these objectives, one of the most important stages in these audits must be taken into account; It is Planning, because it establishes the objectives of the Audit, execution time, number of personnel, scope and scope of work. In order to guarantee a good Planning, it is necessary to carry out the Preliminary Examination stage as objective as possible, and to provide us with the information in such a way that we can make an effective, efficient and economic Planning.
The reason for the Preliminary Examination stage is to obtain a general knowledge of the organization's object, its main characteristics, its internal operation and the external environment in which it operates, in order to determine which audit programs and procedures are best adjusted. to the entity, number of auditors to employ, estimated execution time and determine the cost to reformulate the Audit Budget.
Based on the approaches of MR López Toledo (2001), the auditors do not have enough instruments to carry out this Audit and especially, in the Preliminary Study stage, they do not have tools that allow them to:
- make a thorough analysis of the information they acquire, obtain effectively and with a scientific basis the possible deficiencies, determine the possible critical areas, reflect the possible causes.
All of the above makes it difficult to:
- to be able to concentrate the greater efforts and resources where the problems are identified, to decrease the execution time, the number of personnel and the cost of the Audit, to achieve an Audit with higher quality in terms of results achieved.
Based on what has been stated so far, we ask ourselves as a Scientific Problem: How to carry out a more objective, effective, efficient and economic Management Audit Planning in organizations?
The hypothesis that we have designed is: Yes, a procedure is proposed to be followed for the execution of the Preliminary Examination Phase, from which more specific, detailed information, closer to the reality of the entity to be audited, is obtained in a relatively short time., then a more objective, effective, efficient and economic Management Audit Planning will be carried out.
Based on the research problem and to validate the hypothesis, the following General Objective is pursued: To propose a procedure for the execution of the Preliminary Examination Phase in the performance of the Management Audit in organizations.
This research has as background some research papers on Management Audit presented in Master's Theses and Doctorates, in which the procedures used and the results obtained were studied. In our territory the use of Management Audits are insufficient. Some isolated companies have tried to implement them, which have been consulted, but when they did not give the expected result, they have not followed up on them, so there are very few practical references from these audits.
The structure that was followed for the development of the research is as follows:
In the Introduction an extract of the content of the research is made and an analysis is made of how the need for the present research arises.
In Chapter 1: An analysis is made of the emergence and development of Management Audit, its main concepts and characteristics that distinguish it. The methodology that is instituted in Cuba for this type of Audits and the conceptual analysis of the variables effectiveness, efficiency and economy.
In Chapter 2: A theoretical analysis is made of the techniques and procedures to be used in the proposed procedure in the execution of the Preliminary Examination phase. An assessment is made of the most important aspects to be dealt with in the organizational structure and the strategic plan, the Single Audit File, Budget, Financial Statements, external and internal clients. The financial analysis tools, the expert method, the survey with the SERVQUAL method, the Ishikawa and Pareto diagram are studied.
In Chapter 3: The results obtained in the application of the procedure are shown, as well as an evaluative analysis of the applied methodology.
