Both at the international/european level and at the national level, economic developments and the crisis of the last decade, which were exacerbated by the pandemic, have emphatically demonstrated the importance of sound fiscal management. A significant and integral part of this is the exercise of effective control over entities that the state has entrusted with the responsibilities of managing public funds and resources.

This control should not be limited to identifying irregular or illegal actions, nor to merely verifying compliance with formal rules; it should also extend to whether the inherently limited public resources are allocated in a way that maximizes social benefit. This particularly important aspect of control has led to the concept of performance audits, a matter addressed in the present text.

Performance audits, operating complementarily and in conjunction with legality and regularity audits—whose importance should never be underestimated—can and should represent the next step in the auditing methodology and practice in our country.

Concepts and principles such as economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in the use and allocation of public resources have already been introduced into the Greek legal order, and the monitoring of their compliance should be one of the key priorities of auditing mechanisms.

Keeping this in mind, and given that performance audits are still in a nascent stage in Greece, the text aims to record the theoretical and methodological framework of audits of this category, as well as contribute to a complete understanding of both the concepts and the significance of these audits through the presentation of practical application examples.

The book serves as a valuable resource for public and private sector officials regarding the effective utilization of resources, particularly for auditors conducting audits, as well as for students delving into issues of financial management and auditing. To this end, and for better acclimatization with the subject matter, exercises reinforcing the basic terms and methodologies followed in performance auditing are presented at the end of the book.