Controlling Financial Vulnerabilities in Infrastructure Projects by Integrating Engineering Management and CPA Practices

Abstract

Hidden financial vulnerabilities commonly exist across the full‑lifecycle of large‑scale public infrastructure projects, easily triggering cost overruns, implicit liabilities and loss of public capital. Current academic research suffers from prominent fragmentation: engineering management focuses on schedule, quality and technical control, whereas CPA audits emphasize ex‑post compliance checks. Single‑mode governance cannot fundamentally resolve infrastructure financial risks, and standardized systems for risk‑bottleneck identification and quantitative simulation remain absent. Grounded in the Engineering‑Financial Governance Nexus theory, this paper adopts a mixed‑research paradigm combining meta‑analysis of 127 international publications and 18 overseas large‑scale infrastructure cases. Drawing on Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) and Bayesian‑network simulation, this study systematically decomposes hierarchical financial vulnerabilities in infrastructure and identifies core risk bottlenecks. The results reveal that decoupled interfaces between engineering workflows and CPA audit procedures constitute the sole necessary bottleneck condition inducing major financial losses, and unilateral control delivers extremely low risk‑mitigation performance. Quantitative simulation shows that the probability of major financial losses stands at 32.7 % without integrated intervention; it drops to 9.4 % after integrated engineering‑CPA intervention, yielding a 71.25 % improvement in risk‑control effectiveness. This research fills the gap in cross‑domain governance of infrastructure finance, delivers practical risk‑control solutions for U.S. federal infrastructure under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and enriches the theoretical system of project financial‑cost governance.