This book is the product of an accounting historian—Warwick Funnell—and a career civil servant who spent forty years in the U.K. government's audit service—David Dewar. The result provides a detailed and scholarly account of the organization, conduct, purposes, and outcomes of the process whereby public expenditure in Britain was subjected to scrutiny from medieval times to the present. The Act of 1866 operates as the pivot around which the book revolves.

The British National Audit begins with the Norman Conquest of 1066 and subsequent attempts to monitor the expenditure of the monarch. In the early centuries, the purpose of the National Audit was little more than the presentation of accurate accounts detailing the expenditure that had taken place. Simple as that task appears, it was no easy matter to achieve due to the way that the monarch's personal expenditure was intermingled with that undertaken as head of state. It was not until 1697 that the Civil List was created, separating the two. Even then the task remained difficult as the purpose of the audit was gradually, but very slowly, extended to cover the efficiency with which public expenditure was undertaken and then to measure the effectiveness of the results. The scope of the public audit then expanded beyond all recognition as government expenditure expanded inexorably from 1914 onwards.

Though the National Audit appears to be a very technical subject with closely confined parameters, that is far from the case. It touches on the balance of power between the monarch and Parliament. As long as the monarch had little need to borrow, the power of Parliament was limited, as it was for long periods. Conversely, when the monarch was forced to borrow, the power of Parliament was great, with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 being seen as a seminal date. Though Parliament became increasingly dominant after 1688, and especially after 1783 because of the costs of fighting and losing the American War of Independence, a new balance of power emerged—between the power of Parliament and that of the executive appointed from its midst. In many ways this story begins with the establishment of the Board of Audit in 1785. This was set up to police government expenditure but had to contend with the rival power of the Treasury, which proved to be much stronger. The Act of 1866 was part of an ongoing attempt by Parliament to force the executive to be more accountable by auditing the accounts of expenditure they were required to submit. The results achieved were limited, even after the creation of the independent post of Comptroller and Auditor General in 1866, but that represented a major step in ensuring public accountability for public expenditure.

Though government expenditure rose enormously during both world wars, its nature made it impossible to both produce estimates and then subject them to audits, let alone measure the efficiency and effectiveness of what was done. It was then difficult to return to peacetime practice once the wars were over, despite the huge and lasting increase in government expenditure. Attempts made to strengthen the audit process included better-trained and more professional staff both between the wars and after 1945. It was recognized that the greater scale and complexity of government expenditure required a concomitant increase in the number and expertise of the staff carrying out the audits. This was especially the case as value-for-money audits became more common, but these met with resistance from within the civil service. By the 1960s it was recognized that radical change was required, but it took until 1983 before a new act was passed that established the National Audit Office and provided statutory backing to the practice of value-for-money audits. That act did contribute to making the audit process more independent, freeing it from a high degree of Treasury control, and better suited to assess the complex and wide-ranging nature of expenditure undertaken by modern governments.

This evolution of the public audit is meticulously traced in this book, which provides a definitive account of the changing process. What is left open is whether the public audit, as conducted since 1983, adequately copes with the demands made of it, when so much national expenditure is under the control of the government. However, there is a weakness in the book and that is the implicit assumption, sometimes made explicit, that only those from within the machinery of government are adequately trained, informed, and trustworthy to carry out the audit of public expenditure. There is nothing on the parallel audit process that developed in the private sector, with the rise of large and complex companies, or the way the public audit developed in other countries. The government's audit service was a closed unit immune from competition from outside. It did not recruit professional accountants, with only two in the position of Comptroller and Auditor Generals having such a background. It preferred to train its own and to engage in a continuous battle with the Treasury for responsibility in monitoring public expenditure