Government Auditing Standards
Standards for auditors of U.S government agencies
The Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS), commonly referred to as the "Yellow Book", are produced in the United States by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The standards apply to both financial and performance audits of government agencies. Five general standards are included:
Independence
Due care
Continuing professional education (CPE) 80 hours every 2 years, 24 hours directly related to government auditing
Supervision
Quality control
The Yellow Book standards are used by auditors who examine the federal government, including the Government Accountability Office, various offices of inspectors general, and others. Many local government performance auditors also use the yellow book standards. In addition, CPA firms that perform local government financial audits that include an A-133 "single audit" must follow yellow book standards.
In addition to financial audits, the Yellow Book standards cover Performance Audits, which evaluate the performance of a program or project against defined objectives, such as objectives for efficiency and effectiveness.
The Yellow Book standards provide auditors with a framework for behaving ethically. It outlines five key principles:
The public interest
Integrity
Objectivity
Proper use of government information, resources, and positions
Professional behavior
Other government auditing standards, used by supreme audit institutions
The International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) has developed the INTOSAI Auditing Standards
References
External links
GAO Yellow book requirements
CRGA (Certified Responsible Government Auditor) certificate of the Public Sector Audit Institute.
“Government Auditing Standards” enters the record as standards for auditors of U.S government agencies. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Government, Auditing and Standards can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Government Auditing Standards” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Government, Auditing and Standards provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5588687. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Government Auditing Standards”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Government Auditing Standards primary sources, Government Auditing Standards archive and Government research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Government Auditing Standards”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Government Auditing Standards” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.