Abstract

The internal audit of administrative regularity seems to have found a more precise regulation by virtue of the amendments made to the Local Authorities Consolidation Act by Law by Decree No. 174 of 10 October 2012, converted into law, with amendments, by Art. 1 of Law No. 213 of 7 December 2012. The new arrangement is part of a broader reform that has involved the system of administrative checks considered comprehensively and that also has affected the outside audit by the State Audit Court of the financial management of local authorities (Art. 148bis). The reform again calls to the attention of scholarly reflection the theme of the role and significance that the internal audit of administrative regularity is able to assume in terms of the broader issue of the forms of the guarantee of legality of local administrative action. Both the independence of the audit of administrative regularity from that of accounting and the parameter on which the same is based, in fact decisively influence the effective capacity of this form of leveltwo administration to satisfy the requirement of compliance with the law that the Constitution demands of the administrative activity of local authorities. Within this framework the writing propounds a reconstruction of the internal audit of administrative regularity that properly takes into account the reasons why it is to be considered an answer to the problems of the relationship between self-government and legality, and the extent to which the same can be considered a satisfactory solution to such problems. To that end the work takes up again the thread of the constitutional history of administrative checks, thematizing it from the standpoint of the relationship between self-government and legality.