Call of "Audit" duty

1. There has been an explosion of audits in many different fields: medicine, science, education, technology, environment, intellectual property to name but a few. Audit has assumed the status of an all purpose solution to problems of administrative control. Despite concerns about its costs, the benefits of audit are assumed by its proponents rather than proven. Even though the efficacy of financial audit is currently being doubted as never before, particularly in the wake of corporate scandals, auditing remains powerful. Indeed, alternative mechanisms of long distance control have become almost unthinkable. Audit is an emerging principle of social organization which may be reaching its most extreme form in late twentieth-century Britain. It is as important as an ideal – a set of ideas or logic's – as a practice. Many audit practices have grown because of changes in public sector management and newly prominent ideals of quality, governance and accountability. And yet paradoxically, while audit technologies have contributed to managerial concerns about ‘performance’, the performance of audit itself is far from being unambiguous and free from public dispute. But the spread of audits constitutes a major shift in power: from the public to the professional, and from teachers, engineers and managers to overseers.

2.Audits are not simply answers to problems of accountability. They also shape the contexts in which they are demanded in important ways. Submission to audit has become such a benchmark of institutional legitimacy that resistance and complaint look like attempts to preserve abuses of privilege and secrecy. The audit explosion has its origins in very recent transformations of government which have sought to devolve many of its functions while retaining regulatory oversight.

3. Audit is linked to ideals of organisational transparency and accountability. Yet audits are themselves often very specialized and opaque to a wider public. Audits may provide comfort to stakeholders who are remote from day to day practices but, in doing so, they often deter substantive inquiry which would empower stakeholders. Audit arrangements can bring an end to dialogue inside and outside organisations, rather than helping it. In so far as audit is directed at evoking good feelings about organisational practices it may also become a new form of image management rather than a basis for substantive analysis. In this sense, the fact of audit is becoming more important than the how of audit.

4. Audits are usually publicly visible when they fail. Their benefits are often ambivalent and a source of controversy. Audit reconstitutes itself in a syndrome of regulatory failure: it emerges from crises institutionally secure despite processes of blame allocation within the regulatory world. Problems are defined as particular, while general solutions are usually offered.With each crisis, audits become more formalised and intensive.

5. Audits are not passive practices but strongly influence the environments in which they operate. Instead of involving direct observation, audit is largely an indirect form of ‘control of control’ which acts on systems whose role is to provide observable traces. In a number of areas this results in a preoccupation with the audit-able process rather than the substance of activities. This in turn burdens the auditee with the need to invest in mechanisms of compliance, a fact which has produced a consistent stream of compliant. Concepts of performance and quality are in danger of being defined largely in terms of conformity to auditable process. Indeed, the construction of auditable environments has necessitated record-keeping demands which only serve the audit process.

6. Auditing is a peculiar form of alchemy which, in making auditees auditable, produces regulatory comfort. It is conservative not in the sense of a conspiracy of vested interests, but in the sense of being a system of knowledge which filters and appropriates the unforeseen. In the process of constructing subjects as responsible auditees local structures of trust are displaced and potentially distorted. Any reduction in audit intensity, and the possibility of forms of organisation in which groups and individuals are given autonomy, is literally unthinkable without a new institutional language which does not so much reject audit as assign it to its proper place.

In looking beyond audit we shall need to recognize that a certain style of accountability, which values independent scrutiny, is one value among others. Audit displaces trust from first-order to second-order verificatory activities. We may need to rehabilitate trust at the level of first-order performance, change the organisational conditions under which audit appears to emerge naturally and even give up on the ritualistic details in which accountability is discharged by audit. In doing so we need to reposition audit as a local and facilitative practice, rather than one that is remote and disciplinary, so as to enable rather than inhibit public dialogue. External forms of audit will need to be more modestly conceived. This will require a broad shift in control philosophy: from long distance, low trust, quantitative, disciplinary and ex-post forms of verification by private experts to local, high trust, qualitative, enabling, real time forms of dialogue with peers. In this way we may eventually be in a position to devote more resources to creating quality rather than just to policing it.