Problems and Countermeasures of Internal Audit in Public Hospitals Essay

With the gradual progress of China's healthcare system reform, the development of public hospitals is also facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges. In the new situation, the establishment of a sound hospital internal audit system to promote the sustainable and healthy development of the hospital economy has been urgent. Especially public hospitals belong to the nature of public welfare hospitals, how to ensure that the majority of personal interests of the staff will not be lost, but also to enable the hospital to avoid unreasonable expenditures, improve the economic efficiency of the hospital has become an important responsibility of the hospital's internal audit staff. At present, the internal audit of many hospitals is mostly the implementation of the traditional audit methods, did not rise to the level of internal control and management of the hospital audit. Hospitals in order to adapt to the new health care reform situation, the management mode is bound to change accordingly, in order to comply with the needs of market competition, to achieve double harvest of economic and social benefits, and hospital internal audit as a hospital management, according to the development of hospitals in the new situation to make corresponding changes. This paper focuses on the current problems of internal audit of public hospitals in China and puts forward the corresponding countermeasures.

First, the public hospital internal audit problems

(a) the lack of independence of the internal audit organization, the professional quality is not high

Internal audit as a hospital department, with other departments have inextricable links, it is difficult to carry out the audit work independently as the third-party auditing organizations such as accounting firms in society. Audit work. Many public hospitals do not even have internal audit departments and lack professional auditors. Some members of the internal audit department of public hospitals are transformed from other departments, or in order to cope with the inspection of the higher authorities from the financial sector to temporarily form the audit department, so that in the audit process it is difficult to ensure its independence and objectivity, and at the same time, due to the lack of audit knowledge and skills of the hospital auditor, it is difficult to achieve the appropriate results in the implementation of the audit work.

(B) hospital internal audit work is not valued

Many public hospitals do not have the initiative to carry out internal audits, that the internal audit work is not important, are in order to cope with the higher level inspection or to complete the audit of the functions of the hospital's financial income and expenditure as well as the accounts of the symbolic `checks, these inspections are often in the form of a form, and in the process of checking the hospital's internal auditor in order to avoid offending people, to be checked, to the hospital internal auditor in order to avoid offending people, to be checked. Avoid offending people, the inspected departments often can not be in-depth inspection, not able to effectively control the hospital financial risks, lack of investigation and tracking, which will make the hospital internal audit quality is very poor, the credibility of a great impact, due to the failure to find problems in the financial management of the hospital, the annual internal audit report leadership will not pay attention to the long term will form a vicious circle.

(C) the hospital internal audit approach is traditional, backward means

At present, many public hospitals are still focusing on the internal audit of the day-to-day financial accounting, the main focus is on the financial income and expenditure of the account processing whether there are errors, the use of financial instruments is reasonable, as well as the integrity of the hospital's assets and security, etc., did not rise to the level of the hospital's financial management and financial risk control. It has not risen to the level of controlling the financial management and financial risk of the hospital. Financial information is lagging information, internal audit in the above aspects of the audit can only stay in the results of the audit, did not play the role of the process audit should be, but also the lack of large-scale equipment purchases for hospitals, infrastructure projects, such as audits of the future development of hospitals related to the audit of major economic projects. As the competition between hospitals continues to intensify, the hospital's information technology construction is increasingly becoming the focus of competition between hospitals, which puts forward higher requirements for the internal audit of hospitals. It is difficult to analyze and compare a large amount of hospital background data and financial data without the support of information systems. At present, the audit of many public hospitals is still based on manual checking, through the review of original documents, vouchers and accounting statements and other related information on the hospital financial audit, audit of the information technology process is seriously lagging behind, so it is not only difficult to find financial processing problems, but also impede the play of the internal audit function of the hospital.

Second, the countermeasures against the above problems

First of all, the hospital must ensure that the independence of the internal audit work, which is also the audit of the special nature of the decision, the hospital leadership should pay attention to the audit work, recognizing the internal audit of the enhancement of the hospital's level of financial management, to reduce the financial risk of hospitals, to improve the economic efficiency of hospitals play a significant role in the role, should be rationally planned audit department, the audit department, and the hospital should be able to improve the financial management of the hospital. The role of the audit department should be rationally planned to ensure the independence of the audit work, the difficulties encountered in the audit process of the internal audit staff to take the initiative to help the organization and coordination, to give the necessary support, so as to ensure the normal development of the internal audit work, to create a good atmosphere for the audit of the internal audit staff to improve the quality of the audit work. Secondly, we should improve the function of the audit organization, not only the audit focus on the hospital's financial income and expenditure, the use of special funds and the purchase of equipment and infrastructure inputs, but should expand the scope of the audit, multi-angle, all-round mastery of the hospital's economic operation in all aspects, such as reviewing the hospital's financial internal control system is perfect, whether to avoid the corresponding financial risks, the hospital's medical insurance, agricultural reimbursement process Whether it is in line with the provisions of the system, etc. Strengthen communication with the external audit, make full use of the results of the external audit, the audit should be reflected in the audit before the event in the supervision, after the event to improve, so that the entire audit is considered to be successfully completed, the value of the internal audit work can be reflected, for the audit process found in the problems should be timely to the relevant departments and leaders in charge of reporting to the relevant departments and urge the relevant sections as soon as possible to put forward corrective measures and improve the corresponding mechanisms. Finally, we should focus on the informationization of the audit. Hospital economic operation data is very large, the internal audit staff to take full advantage of information technology, improve the level of information technology, the hospital's internal control of the risk of using information technology to control and carry out targeted rectification, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the audit. In short, the internal audit of the hospital has an important role in the reform and development of public hospitals, public hospitals should pay attention to the internal audit work, to create a good internal audit environment, to expand the impact of the audit, for the health of the hospital, benign development to provide the necessary supervision and protection.

References:

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[3]Chen Qingqing. On the status quo and thinking about the internal audit of hospitals [J]. Administrative Assets and Finance, 2014(08).