You’ve heard the old saw that those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it. The same goes for audits. Ignore our recommendations and the waste, fraud, or risk exposure will continue.
Auditors are historians. We study the past, gather evidence, make causal connections, and document our research, but unlike most historians, we also make recommendations how things could be done better in the future. While historians do not produce findings—no criteria or recommendations—they have a greater breadth and reach than auditors. Historians study the interplay of policies, organizations, and personalities. Auditors generally try to avoid personnel matters and happenstance, and instead focus on ongoing management issues and work procedures. Broken work processes, risk exposure, deteriorated service quality, and financial problems can all be ultimately traced back to a management breakdown. While we may privately conclude that a manager is a bozo, we let others, such as his boss, reporters, and future historians, reach that conclusion.
Despite the narrower scope of auditing, it can still have great significance. Historians routinely remind us that the course of a nation was often determined by the efficiency and effectiveness of its armies, explorers, and clerks. Recall the proverb from our section on causality: “For want of a nail…the kingdom was lost,” that time-honored explanation of how the little things can change the outcome of a war and a civilization.
Auditors are historians in another way: we track the extent of an organization’s capital. Healthy organizations dedicate a portion of their ongoing revenues toward expenditures that produce long-term future benefits. Bridges, water systems, parks, public buildings— they all improve the lives of current and future generations. The measure of such projects reminds us whether we are indeed leaving the world a better place than we found it. I think the word “commonwealth” is a marvelous description of what we inherit with good government.
In this way, a community’s infrastructure is a register of its history. In lean times the new investments are fewer, while periods of growth leave a rich engineering and architectural record. In Portland, many bridges, schools, sewer lines, and streetcar lines were built between 1910 and 1930, a period when the population shot up. This building boom also means a liability boom down the line if subsequent maintenance and replacement efforts do not keep pace.
On a shorter cycle time, auditors also know that good organizations have history embedded in their operations and culture, and use it to guide their efforts toward success. Learning organizations evaluate past efforts and tune their performance to improve results. Sometimes it is simply word of mouth: mistakes are remembered and shared; risks are described and successful strategies explained; the ironic, the humorous, the tragic, the quirky, the traumatic— all teach lessons and can grow a culture of learning.
There seems to be a bias against our predecessors. We often think that the work of the past, the viewpoints, and the strategies are somehow inferior to ours. We assume that we’re smarter than people in the past and ask ourselves, “What were they thinking?” with self-righteous disbelief, not making the effort to really consider how they came to such alien solutions. Of course we know so much more than those blockheads from the 1600s or 1920s or 1950s. Yet their lack of enlightenment reminds us that future generations may find us equally appalling.
Sadly, new regimes often abandon the wisdom of the past. New mayors who defeat an incumbent often dismantle the predecessor’s initiatives and institute their own, hoping to distinguish their own administration so they can take credit for every success. But sometimes an old bridge only needs some repairs, and the siren song of new construction needs to be resisted. Auditors know that there is no glory in maintenance work, and as a result grass cutting often takes a back seat to ribbon cutting at a new park.
Turnover of too many senior personnel is a loss of institutional memory. Without that history something is more likely to go wrong. Sometimes turnover can be good, of course, like when the organization is seriously broken or the culture is toxic. Great things can happen when new outsiders apply a fresh look at the duties and challenges of an organization.
Our audit experience teaches us some important lessons. Our findings often show that current problems are the result of past problem-solving efforts. Like a drunk careening down a street, weaving from curb to curb, over-correcting a problem often produces its own adverse consequences,. Or we may forget that a government program exists to avoid large costs elsewhere: for example, closing mental health facilities and then seeing the former residents taking up jail beds instead.
Deferring maintenance backlogs and other liabilities to a future generation happens in many jurisdictions. This can be seen in the way that we have ignored environmental damage, which will have consequences on generations to come, not to mention the planet. Time is the variable we discount.
Some readers may recall Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1970s. He is still very active and is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation (along with Brian Eno for those 1970s rock fans who remember Roxy Music). The organization “encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.” Their website (www.longnow.org) has a chart showing the time horizon for some aspects of our lives. The longest is nature, meaning that natural changes are often measured in millennia. This is followed by culture, which changes over centuries, then governance, infrastructure, commerce, with fashion taking a brief, meandering track.
Auditors think longer-term but not to the extent of the Long Now Foundation. This is year 02022 according to the Foundation, to remind us that the lives of natural systems, as well as things like nuclear waste depositories, are measured in years with five or more digits.
Similarly, the physical assets in the community, its environment, and the operational culture of the organization are the “long now” for the public. Auditors should play a key role in reminding everyone what was inherited from the past and what we must do so that we leave things better for the future.
