For the past four or five years a bad trend has worsened, and the signs have grown more ominous.
My auditing career began in 1985 and I experienced personal professional growth while the field of performance auditing also grew. The combination was like walking up an ascending escalator.
Jewel Lansing fought hard in the early 1980s to bring performance auditing to the city of Portland and I was lucky to be hired by her not long after she succeeded. She received strong support for her efforts to introduce this new type of auditing from editorials by the newspapers and television stations.
Accountability and transparency became fixed expectations at the local and state level, with enlightened governments increasing their investments in performance measures and continuous improvement systems of management. The Standards evolved from a pamphlet into a framework for credible public reporting of government operations at all levels of government. I saw the number and expertise of government auditors increase, with a strong contribution from ALGA’s conferences, trainings, and advocacy work.
My love of auditing was grounded in our use of facts to leverage change. Too often I had seen officials discuss, allocate, and decide budgets determined by anecdotes and untested theories of successful strategies. Smart, focused auditors could present a convincing case for course corrections to better serve the public.
Google posted an interesting website that archived millions of pages of historical documents up through 2019. You can do word searches on this repository to determine the frequency that a word appears. Below is a chart from the Ngram Viewer looking for the term “audit.”
Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer for “audit”
While “audit” is a small percent of all the words, its relative growth and timing is a good representation of the profession’s expansion.
However, the trend of the chart changed a little after 2000. Auditing and accountability are facing serious challenges right now. Many people have become frustrated with facts and experts and reasoning, which undercuts the value of our work. Political leaders at all levels of government have tapped into this turmoil, reshaping information to suit their own interests. With the internet, it’s easy to use fear and anger to undermine facts and to offer contrary stories.
I never thought that I would see people turn away from hard truths and embrace weird theories, implausible fictions, biased perspectives, and obvious fabrications. And beyond embracing them all, people enthusiastically promote them. In this environment, our audit work can be drowned out by quirky alternate realities.
Meanwhile, scientists, academics, journalists, investigators, government analysts, and yes, we auditors, labor to determine facts, draw conclusions, and publish objective reports. Some people collectively dismiss us all, as part of the “deep state” conspiracies that try to discredit their alternate realities. Sometimes the dismissal is harsher, such as the four Inspectors General who were removed by President Trump in the span of a few weeks. Michael Atkinson, Christi Grimm, Steve Linick, and Glenn Fine are professionals who were doing their jobs.
Inspectors General follow the same Standards that we do and, while appointed by the executive, have a legislative avenue that allows them to meet the independence standard. Yet it doesn’t require a deep understanding of our Standards to know that getting fired, or the fear of being fired, can undercut an auditor’s independence. This structure for internal auditors has a fundamental weakness that, as we have seen, can jeopardize someone who reports the hard truths.
Make no mistake, auditors are part of that deep state; in fact, we further it. We point out when agencies don’t follow laws, procedures, and evidence-based best practices. We point out management problems and question the validity of theories and anecdotal evidence. We help ensure government operates in an orderly, equitable, and efficient manner, as intended. One could argue that auditors are also fighting the deep state when we identify needed changes in government, but the difference is that our efforts are well-researched recommendations for change. The alternate reality of the auditor is incremental improvement.
Newspapers are in the accountability business as much, if not more, than we are. More, because they also tackle topics that would be outside the normal realm of auditing such as political chicanery, special interest influence, and misconduct of public officials. Our purpose and professional fates are tied together.
With less coverage of audit reports, public officials can ignore audit recommendations with fewer consequences from the public. Over time, public officials may be emboldened to obstruct and cut the budgets of audit offices if the public places less value in an auditor because they see fewer audits.
Auditors point out the risks and prevention strategies but we get no credit when bad things don’t happen. I’ve always been frustrated by the many people who don’t place sufficient value on prevention. The importance of prevention continues to be a public struggle during the era of covid. We’ve all seen people ignore the guidance of medical experts for social distancing and vaccinations, willing to gamble with their own health and the health of others. The consequences are not obvious or immediately apparent. The preventive, deterrent power of accountability cannot be measured either.
I know this is a gloomy perspective, but patience, sticking to our principles, and good auditing can overcome it all. We are in a cycle of competing forces and the downside is temporarily winning. We must endure. The public still wants transparent and effective government, and considers auditing one means to accomplish that. This public questioning of government is part of our national culture. It keeps government more responsive and resilient, which is fundamentally important to our long-term success.
I’m encouraged by the value many people see in the factual data about the covid pandemic, grim as it is. Geographic and daily reporting of measures on hospitalizations and deaths help people understand the risks of contagion, and the benefits of following the prevention advice of medical experts. This earned trust can be transferred to an appreciation of experience and expertise in government agencies. For political leaders, trust can be easily lost, and those alternate realities will be undercut by hard facts, and eventually abandoned by the public.
The covid pandemic is a humbling experience for everyone when we ponder our frailties as humans, with our seemingly random susceptibility to infection. As we recover as a country with treatments and immunizations, we will also experience greater delight in gatherings, whether they are with friends, in restaurants, music venues, theaters, sports events, or ALGA conferences.
Stay strong, take care.
