| Written by Mark Funkhouser,
|
Auditing is one of those topics, the discussion of which, inevitably bring up questions about the inherent nature of human beings. Are people inherently good or are they inherently bad? And how does your general answer to this question shape your practice of auditing? My take on this issue is as follows. Most people are like me, with enormous capacity for bad and fairly limited capacity for good. Why do I say this? If I went berserk this afternoon and decided to do as much bad as I could, what is the worst that I could do, by myself? Buy a gun, go to a public place and start shooting? But what if I suddenly felt inspired to do as much good as I could with the remaining years of my life? Should I drop everything I’m doing and go live among the poor trying to help whom I could, for example? That could cause as much pain, to my family and others, as the good I might do.
On the whole, the most good that I can do is probably to carry on in my present roles of husband, father, community member and worker. So, relatively speaking, an individual person acting on his or her own can do what seems like a lot of bad and, at least in a spectacular or dramatic way, relatively less good. It follows then, that if only a few people choose to commit bad acts, we still have big problems. Only a few children out of many millions have taken guns to school and killed classmates, but those few have changed the way Americans think about schools.
So, when people say to me that auditors think people are bad, that auditors are not trusting and are cold and heartless, I make the standard jokes. But if the discussion turns serious, then I may try to lead it along the lines outlined above. A few years ago Kansas City had several councilmembers convicted of various crimes, including accepting bribes. For months afterward, city government was characterized in the community as rife with corruption. City Hall was seen as completely corrupt – and I work in City Hall. The remaining elected officials and thousands of honest employees were all smeared and the functioning as well as the reputation of the government was hurt. Auditors recognize that systems, procedures, internal controls and safeguards must be in place, not because people are inherently bad and cannot be trusted, but because some people are sometimes and it only takes a few people on a few occasions to do a lot of damage.
Auditors recognize that sometimes individuals do bad things. What auditors do not sufficiently recognize, is that “bad things” can also be done by organizations and on a far greater scale than by an individual acting alone. The power of organizations, particularly government organizations, to do great harm is documented in a powerful book, Unmasking Administrative Evil, by Guy Adams and Danny Balfour. Citing examples such as the Holocaust, they write that administrative evil is “part and parcel of the identity of public administration.” Adams and Balfour make the case that it takes an efficient, effective organization to perpetrate truly massive evil. However, like other public administration academics writing about the abuse of power by organizations, the remedies they suggest are at the individual scale, such as improvements in personal ethics. They write, “a new basis for ethics is needed” and that “As administrative ethics is now construed, one cannot be a ‘civil servant’ and be in public dis-agreement with legally constituted political authorities.”
Performance auditing can provide an institutional and structural means of addressing administrative evil, which can complement solutions at an individual scale. The head of a government audit agency is a civil servant who can and by right ought to publicly disagree with political authorities when the facts of the situation warrant the auditor so doing. Most government auditors recognize that the public is their ultimate client and not the organization or jurisdiction that pays their salary. This being the case, their client, the public, is well served when the auditor uncovers abuses on the part of the organization that employs him or her as well as when the auditor uncovers abuses by other individual employees. Most of us accept the metaphor of watchdog as one that describes our role. We, and the people we serve, would be better served if we were more aware of our responsibilities as watchdog over the organization as well as individuals.
|
Funkhouser on Auditing