GOVERNMENT INTERNAL AUDIT MATURITY AND FISCAL MANAGEMENT IN BRAZILIAN STATES: A PANEL ANALYSIS (2010–2024) USING AN IA-CM–BASED PROXY
Internal audit; IA-CM; Maturity; Fiscal responsibility; Panel data; Public governance.
This proposal examines the relationship between government internal audit institutional capability and fiscal management across Brazilian states. Maturity is operationalized through an internal-audit-centered proxy, measured exclusively by using the Internal Audit Capability Model (IA-CM) via a questionnaire administered to central internal control/internal audit bodies, with observable items and minimum documentary evidence requirements. Fiscal management is treated as a multidimensional construct aligned with Brazil’s Fiscal Responsibility framework and measured using five outcomes: primary result, nominal result, net consolidated debt to net current revenue, personnel expenditure to net current revenue, and outstanding payables to net current revenue. The empirical design relies on panel data for the 26 states and the Federal District from 2010 to 2024, combining secondary fiscal data and socioeconomic/political controls with primary data from the maturity instrument. The analytical strategy includes static and dynamic panel models, emphasizing System-GMM, lagged maturity measures, and robustness checks to address persistence, unobserved heterogeneity, and potential endogeneity. Complementary evidence on operational outputs/mechanisms (e.g., annual plan execution, risk-based coverage, and follow-up) will be collected for triangulation and mechanism-consistency checks, without entering the main index. The study aims to contribute by providing a comparable measurement of subnational internal audit capability and estimating its association with official fiscal outcomes over a long time horizon.