Prajapati Trivedi

Increasingly, Supreme Audit Institutions in most countries (e.g., the US Government Accountability Office, the UK’s National Audit Office) are allocating a greater share of their resources in order to conduct Performance Audits of government entities. Yet serious academic work examining the methodological foundations of Performance Auditing is conspicuous by its absence in the extant literature on Performance Auditing. In what follows, I will argue that it is time to rethink the Performance Audit Methodology and offer a possible way forward.

Partial approaches are akin to arranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. In a dysfunctional system, looking for pockets of excellence is a futile exercise. In many cases, you can get temporary results by focusing on some part of the organization or even some government departments, but you can be sure, just like a waterbed, that the inefficiency has travelled to another part that is currently not under scrutiny. Therefore, I have long argued that governments must have an integrated performance measurement system.

Most “Government Performance Management Systems” suffer from serious conceptual flaws that have regularly proven to be fatal. For example, often there are no consequences for “good” or “bad” performance in government. Thus, even a good performance measurement system is a waste of time.  In addition, performance measurement systems in government lack: (a) upfront prioritization of goals and objectives; (b) upfront agreement on how to judge deviation from targets; and (c) focus on the whole of organization.

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Most governments around the world are working on improving the performance of their government agencies. It is clear that the ‘performance’ of a country’s government has emerged as a key determinant of the competitive advantage of nations. The race among nations is being won not by those nations that have more resources or ideas. Rather, the outcome of this race among nations is largely determined by how effectively nations use their resources and how well they implement good ideas and policies. This task is usually achieved by a performance management system in the government.

The Challenge

Absence of an objective, credible and meaningful bottom line for government agencies is arguably the single biggest challenge in managing government. Most of the management problems we observe in government agencies are ‘symptoms’ resulting from the missing bottom line in this sector.

Little wonder therefore that governments around the world want to be seen promoting innovation. However, based on my experience, government efforts in this area can be divided into two broad categories: Most of the governmental resources (money and time) are used for promoting innovation by non-government actors, and only a small amount is allocated for the innovation programs meant to encourage management innovation within the government itself. The former category represents innovation encouraged ‘by’ the government and the latter innovation generated ‘in’ the government.

The Challenge

Government is famously a team sport. Almost everything (really) important we do in government requires effective teams. Whether it is reducing child mortality, disaster management, fighting opioid crisis or stopping money laundering. The list is indeed long and familiar.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the preference for “soft-targets” is a near universal phenomenon. Anyone designing a government performance management system (GPMS) must assume we humans have a preference for soft targets.