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This study asks whether external auditors enable the transfer of policies to the United Nations organizations that they audit and, if so, what types of policies are transferred.

The empirical research is based on a content analysis of 512 external auditor recommendations from 28 pre- and post-accrual reports of 14 UN bodies.

We find that external auditors do enable policy transfer and that such involvements may, at times, veer into non-neutral policy spaces.

We did not analyze all UN organizations with accruals-based accounting. We also did not engage in a longer longitudinal study.

Our findings raise new questions about international organization accountability, the technocratic and policy-specific influences of external auditors, and open a debate about whether attempted policy transfers can be neutral.

The world’s largest group of international organizations is affiliated with the UN. External auditors help ensure that member-state monies are appropriately utilized. Our study is the first to compare pre- and post-accrual external auditor recommendations for 14 UN bodies. It is also the first to notate and study the attempted policy transfers from external auditors to the audited UN bodies.

Country comparative studies especially in Africa on public procurement reforms toward financial control and accountability of public expenditure are limited. Meanwhile, these kinds of studies have potential for providing useful insights on how value for money through public procurement is being ensured across Africa. This paper attempts to provide this. The purpose of this paper is to highlight several policy recommendations for public management aimed at improving public procurement and public financial management (PFM) systems in Africa.

The paper adopts a qualitative case study using secondary data drawn from Global Integrity Index (GII) of the Transparency International and the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessments databases to investigate variables that influence public procurement practices in three purposively selected African countries. The comparative approach for presenting some of the experiences of countries in public procurement methods is used in this paper.

The findings suggest three main variables, namely, government structure and economic variables, complicated by socio-cultural values interact to influence public procurement and PFM systems in the case study countries.

Data for the GII indicators used were only available from 2013, which restricted the discussion of those indicators to a short span (2013–2015).

The socio-cultural milieu within which public procurement takes place has implications for how governance structures function to deliver value-for-money public procurement.

This study adds value by comparing three countries within Africa to reveal common variables which influence public procurement and PFM systems.