Insights from behavioural sciences are increasingly applied to improve our understanding of how cognitive biases and social dynamics shape the decisions and behaviour of people to increase the impact of public policies. The majority of these applications have been concerned with improving policy implementation and changing individual behaviour.

Supreme Audit Institutions (SAI) are a key part of the institutional framework of democratic and accountable states. Audit reports are one of the main vehicles through which SAIs can induce change in the public sector. To do so, audit reports and their observations and recommendations must be relevant, read and understood by the right people, made available at the right time, and the presented in the right way.

Audit reports issued by Supreme Audit Institutions are key in generating impact, as they are the main vehicle through which audits can induce change in the public sector. As such, implementation rates of audit recommendations from audit reports are instrumental to achieve impact. This chapter provides a brief overview on the various factors that help explaining the implementation rate of audit recommendations before focusing in detail on relevant behavioural drivers of both auditors and auditees.

This chapter presents the current follow-up process to audit reports in Chile as well as the main challenges that reduce the likelihood that auditees will address audit observations. In Chile, these challenges are mainly related to the quantity of audit observations, perceptions of unfairness, communication as well as capacity constraints. These challenges are, amongst others, leading to decision fatigue and affecting the motivation of auditees and their attitude towards audit in general.

Insights from behavioural sciences can inspire several measures to increase the likelihood of the uptake of the audit reports issued by the CGR by the auditees. This chapter provides concrete recommendations to the Chilean SAI on measures that could be included during the auditing phase, measures that could enhance the audit reports and measures to motivate or build peer or social pressure during the follow-up process. A strategic perspective that combines several measures is most likely to generate impact and to contribute significantly to enhancing the relevance of CGR’s audits.

This chapter presents a detailed theory of change for two interventions taken from the strategies proposed in Chapter 3 and that could be piloted by the CGR. First, a meeting between the CGR and the audited services before starting the follow-up process could help explaining the audit findings, reduce the cognitive burden and provide avenues for taking corrective actions. Second, the CGR could introduce some flexibility with deadlines to signal credibly a supportive approach by the CGR. In addition, the chapter provides guidance on how to implement the pilot and measure results.