LEGISLATIVE REGULATION OF INTERNAL AUDIT OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES
Background: in the context of the ongoing search in Russia for ways to improve the quality of the activities of educational organizations, it seems appropriate to turn to the foreign experience of the normative regulation of the procedure of self-examination of universities. Objective: to identify common features and differences in foreign approaches to regulating the procedure of self-examination of universities, to consider samples of individual “best” practices, to identify existing problems in the functioning of this procedure. Methodology: in the course of the research, methods of analysis and synthesis, formal legal and comparative legal methods were used. Results: the approaches of states to the regulation of the procedure of self-examination of higher educational institutions were identified and studied. Conclusions: the common features of the regulation of the self-examination procedure in foreign countries are the recognition of the principle of primary responsibility of universities for ensuring the quality of higher education and the concept of unity of internal and external assessment, the use of a wide range of self-assessment methods, the involvement of a wide range of interested parties in self- examination; the main differences are the degree of autonomy of universities from the state and from authorized non-state actors in relation to the procedure and self-assessment criteria; advanced foreign practices consist in the inclusion of socially significant and methodologically innovative components in the self-examination procedure; the main problems are related to the internal organizational culture of internal audit and its functions.