in my opinion, and if the financing data has been prepared from finance department, you can use it even if its not audited, sometimes the audited process take longtime to finalize, so your analysis will be less meaningful 

Thanks

Samer

If the organization is not an enterprise or partnership, it is preferable to use audited financial statement

Your data will become not credible... Better to use audited report...

Dear all, 

In my opinion, if you use that data,  you have to report that in the conclusion section of your paper or thesis, and explain why you have use it ( because it would take lots of time until you obtain the certification, and then you have assumed that it is correct).

All papers/thesis has strengths and weaknesses.

Have a nice time

Helena

I agree with Helena that no thesis or article is perfect but since there are legal/regulatory stipulations of maximum time within which companies are expected to published financials,  I think it will not be out of place to wait for the audited financials rather than making assumptions especially since one is not answering examination question. Assumptions no doubt with involvr a grest desl of subjectivity and this may affect the credibility of conclusions and recommendations.  Within six months of the company's year end,  the audited financials should be out. Anything worth doing is worth doing well

Gedion -

At first this looked like you could use what some US social service federal government agencies use, or at least did use, to check the accuracy of individual State auditors by a subsample checked by federal auditors, but I am not certain. It might be worth your while to check into that.

But if you have budget items, audited or unaudited, to check against actual performance, can you just do a simple regression, with (backwards sounding, I know) the actual performance as the regressor?  That should show "outliers" in your budget items on a scatterplot, which may be the result of not auditing.

Please pardon this if it makes no sense in your context.  I know nothing really of financial management, so perhaps this is not appropriate to your application and/or the kind of data you have and/or how it is collected.

Cheers - Jim 

It depends temporarily it can be use but purpose should be explained and there should be a comment at the end regarding this point

Budgets usually are not audited by independent external auditors. Therefore, it is okay to use a budget that has been reviewed internally and approved by the respective management. 

Financial data that are used for budgetary control will be unaudited in most of the cases. There several reasons for that:

Thus, the management of organization can base its real time decisions only on unaudited financial data which are taken from the organization's accounting system.

I think that if you want to identify the explaining factors of deviations between budget and actual spending, you should use the unaudited data that were observable by the management when the decisions were taken.

As pointed out by Ahmed, Leana and Elli above, budget figures are not capable of being audited as they are future estimates.  But I assume from your question you already know that.  It is the ACTUAL financial data which would be capable of being audited but, from your question, it appears the actual numbers have not been audited.  If that is the best data you can obtain, you will need to accept it and report as such in your conclusions. 

Another option would be to review the actual financial data for reasonableness.  There are a couple of ways to do this:

1.  historic regression analysis and reasonableness of trends against known causes (eg inflation)

2.  correlation against other data for consistency, eg cash flow data

In that way you will be able to report that the data was tested before placing reliance on it for research purposes. 

Budgets, generally are part of management accounting, are not audited because there is no such a requirement. Financial statements are required by law that public interest entities and sizable companies are audited. You can use budgets as management reports (they should be reliable anyway) and indicate this as a limitation of your study which does not necessarily impact the results significantly. Ultimately , you can also look at audited financial statements and audit management letter. If auditors express some reservations, then it is an indication of management weaknesses which signify that management reports may not be reliable. Since this is a government entity, look for controller and auditor general and country budget controller to find insight on the reliability of the payments and receipts and the variances.

Dear Gideon, if you could not access to the audited numbers, unaudited data could be the option. It is advisable to insert a footnote in the paper that your have used the unaudited figures and if possible state the impact of using those data to your analysis and findings.

Audited data is more reliable than unaudited data. If you take audited data your research is more validity.

Dear Gedion, 

You can create a "limitations" section in your research paper where you describe any limiting factors of your research. For example, if you deal with a case study, you could mention that your results may not be generalised for the whole population of comparator companies. As well, in the limitation section you could include any limitations regarding information gathering. For example, that you could not obtain any audited statements and that for this reason the numbers should be used with caution. However, in case of budgets, knowledgable readers would assume that they are not audited anyway.

Paul