Performance Improvement in the Spanish Local Government: A Proposal for Internal Control in Social Care Services

Proper public management is not possible without the existence of internal control mechanisms that ensure reliability of the information for decision making. In Spanish local government this involves overcoming certain weaknesses detected for the internal control and audit function. Based on some of the results obtained by the authors through a survey over Spanish local government internal and external auditors, this work confirms the existence of consensus regarding the need to design and implement internal control mechanisms that assure reliable and useful information on performance and results. Upon this scenery, the paper puts forward a proposal for the development of the internal control, using the case of Homecare Services as a model. This system pursues to provide a useful tool for public managers, contributing to reduce the effects of the financial context over performance, as well as to facilitate cooperation with external audit.