By role

Three professions, one shared gap.

The auditor, the accountant and the cost controller arrive at the same capital programme from three directions. Each carries a standard that says how to do their work, not what to look for.

That is not a criticism of the standards; it is their job, and each says so plainly, as the quotations on the pages that follow show. INTOSAI is the most direct: it publishes about a hundred audit questions for public procurement, then states that they are a menu to choose from, are not exhaustive, and need to be completed with criteria the auditor designs. These pages are an attempt at part of that gap.

Internal auditorThe auditing standards govern independence, evidence and reporting. Establishing the criteria is your job, and past contract closure there is very little published to build them from.Corporate accountantIPSAS 45 sets recognition, measurement and depreciation. The date, the completeness test and the component split all sit in project files that finance is not on the distribution list for.Cost controllerThe GAO cost and schedule guides are the most complete free statements of what a defensible estimate and a defensible schedule look like. Both are about a project, and a project ends.

What these pages are not

This is not a filtered list of articles with a job title on top. Each page begins with the published obligations the reader already holds, cited and linked, and says where those obligations stop. The material is then arranged across the same four stages the rest of the site rests on.

Where this publication has nothing for a role at a stage, the stage stays on the page and says so. A gap is only visible when the place it belongs is shown empty, which is the argument the assurance framework makes about programmes and this publication applies to itself.