There is a legend in my office about a time that we hired a large commercial audit firm to do a performance audit for us. At the time of the public hearing, the board of the agency we had audited greeted our presentation with hostility. After the first few negative questions and sarcastic comments, the engagement partner for the audit simply turned on his heel and walked out of the meeting leaving me at the podium. On his way out the door he told one of my auditors something like this: “My job is to tell them what I’ve found. They aren’t listening, they aren’t interested in listening, and if they won’t listen, my time is too valuable to waste.” I guess I always sort of agreed with that position, but I don’t anymore. That board doesn’t own the agency, the public does. If the findings are significant, the public needs to understand them and that is often going to require more than a single brief public hearing and an audit report on the shelf. If I’m going to be understood I have to communicate effectively.

Imagine that you have done an audit of bridge maintenance. The city has about 400 bridges. Many are quite small and a few are major spans across a large river. Bridge maintenance is the responsibility of the Public Works Department and the evidence you’ve compiled shows that it has been underfunded for years. As a consequence many bridges are in a significant state of deterioration and there seems to be at least a remote risk of failure of some bridges if the pattern of neglect is not halted. How shall you characterize your findings?

Do you use that old audit standby “Improvement Needed in Bridge Maintenance” or should you opt for the far more inflammatory “The Broadway Bridge Could Collapse if Public Works Doesn’t Fix It.” Some of you will say it depends on the evidence, others will say it depends on the audit objectives or the needs of users or perhaps the responsiveness of management. As an auditor, I agree with all that. As a citizen, I think maybe it depends on whether you and your family use the Broadway Bridge every day to cross the Missouri River. Clearly there is a balancing act here. The very reason that government auditors have a degree of trust and credibility is that we are seen as levelheaded, analytical, straight-shooters. If we cry “wolf” too often we risk losing credibility. But I would argue that we are currently erring far too much on the side of caution. Many of us bemoan the lack of action on the major findings in our reports. We blame management for incompetence and protecting their own interests. We blame elected officials for looking only for short-term political gains. And we blame citizens for ignorance and apathy. But when I look at our work, I often think that the reason we were ignored is that we were not understood. We did not communicate effectively.

There is a huge and diverse literature on effective communication. Here are some points that I think are relevant to our work:

Craft a clear message. First and foremost, we must intend to be understood and not simply heard. To do that we must use language that is concise and direct. Not fuzzy. Not qualified. Our language must be spare. Ideas and concepts must be illustrated and supplemented wherever possible with specific examples. We should write in active voice, effectively using metaphors and analogies, avoiding excessive detail, avoiding jargon and technical terms, and using plain language.

Use a variety of communication techniques. For example, Edward Tufte is a well-respected author and speaker who has developed sophisticated ideas on the visual presentation of data that are very relevant to our work. John Nalbandian is Chair of the Public Administration Department at the University of Kansas and a former Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas. He has shown how the communication styles of elected officials and professional technical staff differ radically - elected officials want stories and bureaucrats want facts. Effective audit reports will incorporate the communication styles of both.

Communicate on multiple levels. There has to be a well-written print document, but that is only the basis and beginning point for communication. It has to be supplemented by oral presentations to relevant groups of stakeholders and direct face-to-face dialogue with the most critical decision makers. This is the only way to convey a clear message with the right nuances and strengths.

Communicating must be a sustained effort. We should work until the findings in our report are no longer relevant or the recommendations we made have been implemented. Sometimes it will take years of building trust and credibility and of restating the issues until either the timing is right or a critical mass of opinion has been built to the point that real action is taken.

Convey conviction, passion and a sense of urgency. Cold-blooded rationality is often simply not a sufficient basis for people to understand the gravity of our findings. By not letting people see how we feel about what we’ve found we are depriving them of a significant amount of the information that they need to make their own judgments. The first step in a successful audit report is making sure it is understood. Just reporting significant problems and opportunities for improvement isn’t enough. The shift in paradigm that I’m proposing is risky and difficult, but if we believe in the importance of performance auditing to effective democratic government, it seems like the only way to go.