The portfolio of Lilith Hasbeck

About the project

Title: Audītor Pūblicus
Type of work: Co-design / design provocation (a new role for the public auditor)
Date: January – March 2015
Extent of the project: 8 weeks, full-time

ICAEW's AuditFutures is looking to change the profession of auditing in a way so that auditors can help solve real social challenges and advance the role of the public interest in the profession. Through close collaboration with a group of auditors, I have co-designed a new role for the future auditor which responds to these challenges.

Auditor Publicus is a reshaped public sector audit function. It proposes that public auditors take their role as mediator between government and citizens seriously, and focus on restoring the declining trust by ensuring that the information streams going back and forth are true, fair and reflect the nuances. This is done by auditing political promises, influencing and reshaping the current debate, as well as facilitating Citizen Juries (so-called mini-publics).

The design

In a public sector context, citizens are essentially both at the receiving and paying end of auditing, yet most neither know nor care. Where auditors usually play a role in building trust between investors and companies, trust between citizens and government is at an all-time low — and auditors aren’t playing an active role. Audītor Pūblicus aims to change this, and in some way, this goes back to the roots of the auditor - and yet applies this to a modern societal challenge.

I have had immensely positive reactions from accountants and auditors, and there is a will and wish to take this further.

That trust between citizens and their government is at an all-time low is not a suprise to most people. This striking statement is from one of the people I spoke to.

This new public auditing takes on a role of a kind of new fourth estate, that ensures that these information streams going back and forth between citizens and government are honest and reflect the nuances.

The three new initiatives of the auditor publicus.

As a way of collating the learnings from each workshop, I designed and hand-bound a booklet.

Audītor Pūblicus is a result of a number of co-design sessions with a small team of accounting and auditing professionals. The non-financial auditing led us here: ‘I think for society as a whole, the non-financial piece of the audit, or set of accounts, are far more important than the actual financials’.

Imagine the problem as an iceberg: Counteracting the mistrust comes down to making the tip that people see representative. This is the role I propose for the new public auditor; to essentially function as scuba divers, who investigate and bring the right pieces of information to the surface.

The name itself goes back to the latin roots of "auditor" as 'a listener', and "public" as 'of or belonging to the people'.

The role of the auditor in the middle ages

In the middle ages, when the lord of the manor was away, he sent somebody trusted back to ensure that all was fine, and to report back because he did not have the bandwidth to deal with all the detail. This was the role of the auditor.

This new role for the public auditor goes back to the roots of auditing; only now the lord of the manor is the citizens, and the manor is the government as a whole.

The role of the current and future auditor

This future role for the public auditor builds on the existing transferable skills and actions of the auditor of today.

Mini show (design provocation)

As a design provocation, I showed a sculptural exhibition piece in a one-day show at the RCA. From the outside, it looked like nothing more than ugly, brown cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other, taped together with brown packing tape. However, each box had a peephole, and once looking inside, each box revealed an aspect of Audītor Pūblicus through video and sound, or visual means of storytelling.

To some extent, the box sculpture itself conveyed what auditing is: To find out about the project you had to take on the role of a mini-auditor; investigating and viewing the same thing from different perspectives, searching for the bigger picture and all the facts.