SHE’S Scotland’s chief bean counter, responsible for scrutinising the country’s public finances and ensuring taxpayers get value for money.

Auditor General Caroline Gardner oversees the accounts of 220 organisations, including the Scottish Government, Police Scotland, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, Scottish Water, NHS boards, local authorities and colleges.

Having grown up in a council estate in west London, she seems almost embarrassed when asked to confirm her salary (£144,000 per year). Gardner sees herself very much as one of a team of 250 people who works at Audit Scotland, eschewing the typical boss’s corner office in favour of a nondescript desk next to colleagues in a bright, open-plan, almost Ikea-inspired office in West Port, Edinburgh.

Sitting in a breakout room as Audit Scotland staff busy around on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling glass window behind her, Gardner admits the job brings pressure. She has faced down accusations that reports critical of public spending were “watered down” after pressure from civil servants. “The job is quite exposed. As Auditor General you’re reporting in your own name and in the current climate it is used in very political ways by politicians of all stripes. That goes with the territory because public spending is being squeezed, because we’re moving into this new climate in Scotland with raising a significant amount of our own taxes and because the politics are highly contested.”

The 54-year-old has lived in Edinburgh for more than two decades with her husband, who teaches IT to children with additional support needs.

Her mother was a nurse, her father a toolmaker and she admits she and her younger brother knew “there wasn’t money to spare”. Gardner was the first in her family to go to university, which she said was a “huge privilege” because “a much smaller proportion of people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s went to university than do now”.

She studied business, computing and maths at the University of Aston before going on to work for the local council in Wolverhampton as a trainee accountant, turning down the chance to join an NHS management scheme because she decided accountancy would “open more doors”.

Gardner said: “I have never struggled with maths and what I liked about the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy training was it applied my numerical ability to things that matter to me – to public services and to making a difference.”

Gardner has made her career in public service because “like lots of people my age, public services made a huge difference to my life. I was born in an NHS hospital, I grew up in a council house, I went to a state school and I went on to university. All of the chances I had came from good public services and I think that matters”.

She went on to work for the Audit Commission, overseeing the finances of councils and, later, NHS services. In that time she gained an MBA from Warwick Business School.

Gardner was named director of health and social work studies at the Accounts Commission in 1995, a position which took her to Scotland for the first time.

She recalls: “At that time the Accounts Commission had taken responsibility for auditing the NHS in Scotland and I was appointed to set that up. It was a massive opportunity for a 32-year-old.” She held the role for five years, a period which saw Scotland vote for devolution and the Scottish Parliament reconvene.

“It changed everything and it’s one of the reasons I’ve been here for 22 years,” she says. “It was an exciting time for me and everyone else working in public services. Setting up the Scottish Parliament was a big step in Scotland’s public services having more room for manoeuvre, more scope to take different approaches here. It also meant Parliament here was paying more attention to Scotland’s public services than the Westminster Parliament ever could have done. There was also a chance to think again about what role audit plays in supporting that scrutiny of public services, helping to make better decisions for the future.”

After devolution, Gardner was promoted to deputy Auditor General, a post she held for 10 years. During that busy time, she achieved a first class honours degree in English literature with the Open University.

“You make time for things that matter to you,” she said. “I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed reading. My degree in maths, computing and business was really useful but I don’t love it in the way that I love reading. It was a broad-ranging course and the part I enjoyed most was on 19th-century novels.”

She names Jane Austen’s Persuasion as her personal favourite. Tellingly, the central character is the daughter of a debt-ridden baronet who rents out his country house to raise funds.

After a decade as deputy Auditor General, Gardner’s career took an unexpected turn when she was asked to rescue the finances of a Caribbean nation. Britain had temporarily abolished home rule in the Turks and Caicos Islands in 2009 after a parliamentary inquiry found evidence of widespread corruption and accused the then chief minister, Michael Misick, of selling Crown land to fund investment. Misick was forced to resign and then fled to Brazil following an inquiry which found that he enjoyed a “Hollywood lifestyle” financed with “a high probability of systemic corruption”. He was extradited at the beginning of 2014, arrested, charged and released on bail. His trial started a year ago, and has yet to conclude.

Gardner said: “In 2010, the Department for International Development (DfID) was looking for somebody who could go out as chief financial officer on the back of the government corruption scandal.”

She added that due to the global financial crisis, the Turks and Caicos “government revenues had fallen by a huge amount in a short period so they were reaching a stage when they couldn’t pay their bills without the UK Government’s support”.

However, she got more than she bargained for. “There was a fair bit of low-level threat going on,” she said. “If I was out doing my shopping on a Saturday morning you’d get people making remarks. One of my team was stopped and threatened when she was out running. At the time it was country with a high level of violent crime. Armed robbery was not uncommon. When you put that together with the job I was doing it felt like a threatening environment and a long way from home. It was quite an experience. It wasn’t fun but it was satisfying.”

After turning around the country’s economy Gardner returned to Scotland where she freelanced for just under year before she was named Auditor General for Scotland in 2012.

She’s known to be unflappable when appearing before MSPs in the Scottish Parliament to explain detailed audits of public finances and that’s in no small part down to her experiences overseas.

Gardner also deals with the pressure by having a work/life balance. “I read a lot, walk a lot, it will sound terribly geeky and boring but I like playing and listening to early music. It’s good to have a life outside of work where you can release the pressure valve.”

But within a heartbeat Gardner is back on the subject of her work, speaking about upcoming reports on ferry services, the NHS and childcare, which will all be released by the end of the year.

Barely a breath after talking about her hobbies, she says: “The job is about making sure the work itself stands up to scrutiny, that there’s evidence for everything we say, that we can back it up – that we make sure it’s fair and balanced.

“So, although there’s pressure, it’s a privileged position, and I do my best to make sure we’re never in a position where the work itself is being criticised. It will be used in different ways by different political parties but the work itself has to stand as evidence based.”