{"id":173,"date":"2015-11-30T09:51:14","date_gmt":"2015-11-30T09:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scscsussex.wordpress.com\/?p=173"},"modified":"2015-11-30T09:51:14","modified_gmt":"2015-11-30T09:51:14","slug":"the-challenge-of-armchair-auditing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/centre-for-the-study-of-corruption\/2015\/11\/30\/the-challenge-of-armchair-auditing\/","title":{"rendered":"The challenge of armchair auditing"},"content":{"rendered":"

In August 2010 the then Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, announced<\/a> that he wanted to empower \u201can army of armchair auditors\u201d to scrutinise the work of his department.\u00a0 This move would signal the beginning of a \u201cnew era\u201d of government transparency and accountability with any outgoings of \u00a3500 or more being publicly revealed online. The wider world was subsequently going to have access the nuts and bolts of how in excess of \u00a3300m (the departmental budget in 2010) was being spent.<\/p>\n

And this was clearly only meant to be the start of things.\u00a0 David Cameron\u2019s Conservative\/Liberal Democratic government embraced this new world of openness and accountability, opening up information on a whole range of things from crime statistics to spending commitments and from contract awarding to hospital waiting lists.\u00a0 This new openness would not only help to clamp down on waste, but it would also drive both efficiency and responsiveness (see here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the government promised to develop a system of performance management based around a range of performance indicators.\u00a0 The 200 plus indicators would be an ideal tool for the public to hold those with entrusted power to account.\u00a0\u00a0 This was, or so it seemed, bordering on the revolutionary.\u00a0 Engaged citizens would be able to unpack and dissect the minutiae of government performance and the age of Sir Humphreys<\/a> pulling the strings facelessly from behind a cloak of anonymity would be behind us.<\/p>\n

How, then, has this veritable army of auditors faired?\u00a0 And how has government and the process of governing changed as a result?\u00a0 The answer to the first question gives a very strong steer as to the answer to the second; impressive though the brave new world sounds, the army has not so much organised a mutiny as never really enrolled in the first place.\u00a0 There are one or two notable, and quite specific, exceptions (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>), but as Ben Worthy<\/a> and Robyn Munro<\/a> have argued, there are plenty of good reasons why one can\u2019t really blame prospective armchair auditors for\u00a0falling at the first hurdle.<\/p>\n

A recent report<\/a> by the Institute for Government (IoG) outlines three specific reasons why this drive to increase people power has at best moved forward only patchily.\u00a0 The IoG boils it down to poor quality data, poor communication (understood as inadequate explanations of what the data means) and very little evidence that there was any great public willingness to use the system in the first place.<\/p>\n

Whilst the third of these is something that should probably not surprise us too much \u2013 minus the pay of a fully trained auditor it can\u2019t be that big a surprise that people aren\u2019t queuing up to be amateur forensic accountants \u2013 the existence of the other two problem areas are disappointments.<\/p>\n

The IoG, to be fair, was quick to recognise that some government departments (and service providers more broadly) did do their best to be open with both data and explanations of it, but some appeared to take their obligations anything but seriously.\u00a0 Data was often simply not available, or when it was available it was in a format that was unsearchable or very hard to actually use in any straightforward sense.\u00a0 A pile of .pdf documents the size (if printed out) of a hefty doorstop might well fulfill transparency obligations, but it is hard to claim that all but the unhealthily obsessed can do anything with these things.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the last few months a number of websites and apps have been developed to help make data-sifting easier.\u00a0 And, more specifically, to enable the interested external observer to uncover potential malpractice.\u00a0 If you\u2019re interested in public procurement data, for example, then http:\/\/www.spendnetwork.com\/<\/a> is a useful starting point, while https:\/\/openspending.org\/<\/a> claims to \u2018track and analyse public financial information globally\u2019.\u00a0 In November 2015 the University of Sussex and Transparency International UK took a closer look at what these websites and apps might offer, convening a focus group to try and unpack their usefulness.\u00a0 15 students on the MA in Corruption and Governance plus 3 PhD students on the SCSC\u2019s PhD programme sat down to see what they could make of them.\u00a0 The students looked to try and uncover potentially interesting transactions or processes in a number of the UK\u2019s local authorities.\u00a0 They used the websites to help them, as well as conventional search engines such as google.\u00a0 The aim was to see if an interested observer could find anything of note.<\/p>\n

The outcome was predictable; the students found little of genuine substance.\u00a0 On the one hand, the data remains both patchy and largely impenetrable.\u00a0 The numbers mean little to those who don\u2019t understand the context, and there is effectively nothing out there explaining why decisions were made, specific contracts awarded and government took the form that it did.\u00a0 On the other hand, unless an armchair auditor possesses the talents of Lieutenant Colombo, the patience of a saint and, perhaps most importantly, some sort of tip or piece of inside information to help them head in the right direction, then he or she won\u2019t be able to make much progress at all.\u00a0 As one of the MA students, Koya Rahman, noted \u201cI spent 90 minutes looking hard at all of this, but, in truth, if I\u2019d been at home and not part of this experiment I\u2019d have given up after 10 minutes\u201d.\u00a0 Who can blame her?<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is nonetheless too soon to be so downbeat about people power in this area.\u00a0 The rise of the open data agenda and the existence of a number of initiatives to both broaden its scope and streamline the processes that underpin it mean that things may look very different in the near(ish) future.\u00a0 David Cameron, to be fair, does seem to have embraced the agenda rather more than many of his international contemporaries.\u00a0 But, the devil really is in the detail, and unless both the IT infrastructure of the public sector can be improved and the accessibility of the data is enhanced then armchair auditing will remain the privilege of the (very) few.<\/p>\n

Dan Hough<\/p>\n

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In August 2010 the then Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, announced that he wanted to empower \u201can army of armchair auditors\u201d to scrutinise the work of his department.\u00a0 This move would signal the beginning of a \u201cnew era\u201d of government transparency…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

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