Auditee Perceptions of External Evaluations of the Use of Resources by Local Authorities

The research reported in this paper takes up Michael Power's challenge that accounting researchers should pay more attention to the perceptions of auditees and how they respond to audit regimes. The setting of the study is the intense performance assessment regime imposed on local authorities in England from 2002 to 2009, one part of which – the Use of Resources (UoR) assessment – rated the financial management capability and performance of each English local authority. The perceptions of senior local authority finance officers within the Yorkshire and the Humber region are reported, using a written questionnaire and an interview to explore the reasoning behind the chosen responses. The results are more nuanced than suggested by either the official rhetoric justifying the UoR system or by those critics who view such systems as dysfunctional. Respondents portray themselves as intelligent actors, not as passive recipients. Most learned to use the UoR process to drive performance improvement, though there is some ambiguity as to whether the improvements were genuine or solely a product of the scoring system. Though adding to workload, UoR was regarded as one of the external pressures to be managed and its requirements largely represented professional views of best practice. Three of the types of control that characterise ‘regulation inside government’ (Hood et al., 1999) – oversight, competition and contrived randomness – are seen through the perceptions of the auditees. There is some evidence of the fourth style, mutuality – working through professional networks to help local authorities improve their actual and reported performance.     

Cuts,collaboration and creativity

Massive cuts in public spending are demanding a new era of collaborative working among partners in English local governance. Partnerships have the capacity to pool assets, share scarce resources and leverage new forms of social and human capital. City-wide partnerships are also ideal vehicles for public service creativity. Action research in Sheffield reveals the potential, but also the pitfalls, of attempts to mainstream partnership principles, now they are no longer mandated by central government.     

Changing management roles in the Scottish NHS: implications for management learning and development

The UK government's austerity means that public service providers, such as the National Health Service (NHS), are looking for efficiencies from service integration and collaborative working. This paper highlights how NHS (Scotland) management is coping with these changes and how the role of the manager and the nature of management development is being transformed. New forms and processes of management learning and development are needed for collaborative partnership working in multi-agency public service environments.     

PERFORMANCE REPORTING BY MALAYSIAN LOCAL AUTHORITIES: IDENTIFYING STAKEHOLDER NEEDS

The concept of public accountability promotes the need for a comprehensive set of performance‐related information to satisfy the information needs of a diverse stakeholder interest group. However, literature concerned with the scope of information to be disclosed, and in particular within the context of a developing country, is limited. This paper identifies the information set which stakeholders of Malaysian local authorities consider relevant in the monitoring and assessment of local authority performance. Stakeholders indicated strong interest in performance information that is not traditionally disclosed in the financial statements: non‐financial information particularly performance measurement of outputs, outcomes, efficiency and effectiveness. Disclosures in the Statement of Revenue and Expenditure and forward‐looking information are generally regarded as the most important disclosures. The results of the study also indicate differences amongst stakeholders as to the level of importance that they place on certain items especially items related to internal policies and governance and financial position of the local authorities. The findings will be of significance to policy makers interested in improving the performance reporting of Malaysian public sector entities, particularly local authorities.     

External Regulation and Best Value in Local Government

Best Value has been presented by central government as a means of promoting local diversity and innovation. However, it contains a large superstructure for regulating the behaviour and performance of local authorities, through performance indicators, audit, and inspection. The characteristics of these regulatory instruments are analysed and their potential strengths and weaknesses are assessed. The instruments overlap not only with local authorities' own internal management processes, but also with each other. Therefore it is concluded that the costs of regulation may outweigh the benefits.     

On IT governance structures and their effectiveness in collaborative organizational structures

Organizations today engage in various forms of alliances to manage their existing business processes or to diversify into new processes to sustain their competitive positions. Many of today's alliances use the IT resources as their backbone. The results of these alliances are collaborative organizational structures with little or no ownership stakes between the parties. The emergence of Web 2.0 tools is having a profound effect on the nature and form of these alliance structures. These alliances heavily depend on and make radical use of the IT resources in a collaborative environment. This situation requires a deeper understanding of the governance of these IT resources to ensure the sustainability of the collaborative organizational structures. This study first suggests the types of IT governance structures required for collaborative organizational structures. Semi-structured interviews with senior executives who operate in such alliances reveal that co-created IT governance structures are necessary. Such structures include co-created IT steering committees, co-created operational committees, and inter-organizational performance management and communication systems. The findings paved the way for the development of a model for understanding approaches to governing IT and evaluating the effectiveness for such governance mechanisms in today's IT‐dependent alliances. This study presents a sustainable IT-related capabilities approach to assessing the effectiveness of suggested IT governance structures for collaborative alliances. The findings indicate a favorable association between organizations' IT governance efforts and their ability to sustain their capabilities to leverage their IT resources. These IT-related capabilities also relate to measures business value at the process and firm level. This makes it possible to infer that collaborative organizations' IT governance efforts contribute to business value.     

Competing,collaborating or controlling? Comparing benchmarking in European local government

The way that local authorities in OECD countries compare and benchmark their performance varies widely. This paper explains some of the reasons behind the variations. The current local government benchmarking schemes in Europe— their governance, coverage and impact—largely depend on the institutional characteristics of the respective administrative and local government systems (in other words, the starting conditions). There are signs that, as a result of the fiscal crisis in Europe and need to cut public sector costs, many countries (but not England and Wales) are leaning towards compulsory large-scale benchmarking projects.     

Concepts and Indicators of Local Authority Performance: An Evaluation of the Statutory Frameworks in England and Wales

A conceptual framework for evaluating statutory performance indicators for local authorities is developed. The framework, which contains 14 dimensions of organizational performance, is then applied to the indicators set for local government from 1993/94 to 2001/02. The results show that the validity and comparability of the indicators has improved substantially over time. However, a critical weakness that remains is the absence of indicators that link spending with service outcomes. Such indicators are essential if judgements about value for money and Best Value are to be made.     

Assessing the Quality of Local Governance: A Case Study of Public Services

This article reports the results of an intensive study of the quality of local governance in a town in the UK, demonstrating how the concept of local governance can be operationalized, presenting key findings on the quality of local governance in the case study and suggesting that more limited, service-oriented, performance assessment systems may be misleading.     

Best Value Audits in Scotland: Winning Without Scoring?

Best Value audits have encouraged improvements in the corporate capacity of Scottish local authorities. They are seen by local government as credible and, in contrast to Comprehensive Performance Assessments in England, are applauded for taking account of local priorities and contexts. However, there are some concerns about the consistency and transparency of the process, and reports have failed to attract public interest. In future, the Best Value audit process will need to pay more attention to the importance of partnership working between councils and other local agencies.     

Performance Management Systems in the Public Housing Sector: Dissemination to Diffusion

This article examines a case study of the implementation of a performance management system in public sector housing in Fiji. The aim is to explore and provide interpretations of why performance management and measures were introduced and implemented and reveal if the indicators were appropriate to serve the strategies of the organisation. The article draws on diffusion of innovation theory and explores the effectiveness of performance management. The research approach is qualitative in nature and uses a case study strategy. Interviews and documentary evidence provide the empirical basis for the research. The organisation has established formal objectives at both institutional and departmental levels and has a performance management system at both levels. With growing pressure for commercialisation from donor agencies, the accounting and managerial practices seem to contradict the organisation's original purpose to provide housing needs for the poor. The case study extends the literature on performance management in developing countries and illuminates the deficiencies within the performance management system. This study has implications for practitioners and researchers as it promotes a better understanding of a new public management practice technique which, in this case, was inadequate to satisfy local housing needs.     

Inconsistent Depreciation Practice and Public Policymaking: Local Government Reform in New South Wales

Public policy based on numerical indicators – a form of ‘public management by numbers’ – has become commonplace across the world. Whereas a good deal is known about the deleterious effects of this type of policymaking – including ratcheting, output distortion and ‘gaming’ – unfortunately little attention has focused on the adverse local government policy consequences of inconsistent depreciation accruals by local authorities. This paper seeks to address this gap in the empirical literature on local government performance. After examining the use of accounting data by local government policymakers, the paper reviews available empirical evidence of inconsistent depreciation practice both in Australia and abroad. We then consider the recent New South Wales (NSW) Independent Local Government Review Panel's use of accounting ratios as supporting evidence for boundary change in local government as a case study of the adverse impact of inconsistent depreciation practice. The NSW experience clearly demonstrates the distortionary effects of empirical evidence resulting from significant variation in depreciation accruals by individual local councils. The paper concludes with an assessment of the options available to local government policymakers wishing to obtain more accurate accounting accrual data for policy formulation purposes.     

Delivering Public Services Under the New Public Management: The Case of Public Housing

One of the biggest changes in public sector housing practice in recent years has been the introduction of New Public Management techniques. Housing associations, promoted by successive governments to supplement local authority provision of social housing, have readily taken on the new management agendas of performance indicators and business disciplines in service delivery. The author identifies a conflict between the social purposes of public funding for housing and the business practices of housing associations. The limited accountability of housing associations allows for practices that lead to social exclusion. For local authorities, a parallel conflict arises because of government emphasis on 'what works' in public housing management, rather than on 'what matters'.     

The usefulness of performance reporting in local government: comparing Italy and Spain

This article presents a comparative analysis of the perceived usefulness of performance information by managers in local authorities in Italy and Spain. Italy and Spain have similar cultural and administrative characteristics and in both countries there are external requirements (from central government) to adopt performance indicators. The adoption of performance indicators was found to be almost symbolic in both states.     

Police Performance Measurement and Human Rights

The management of police performance through cash-limited budgets, performance indicators and crime statistics is the result of a control systems paradigm. This article uses examples of police practice to raise the possibility that this performance culture may be in tension with human rights legislation. The article suggests a shift to a values-based learning paradigm and the need for greater balance between the rationality of a control paradigm and the subjectivity of values.     

The impact of contract characteristics on the performance of public–private partnerships (PPPs)

Four significant features of public–private partnership (PPP) contracts are analysed to understand their impact on performance. These are whether the contract allows sanctions to be imposed; its complexity; its flexibility; and whether renegotiation is possible. The effects of these characteristics were investigated by surveying participants in all of the PPP projects in The Netherlands. The only feature considered to have any significant impact on perceived performance was the possibility of imposing sanctions. The authors’ findings cast doubt on earlier research into managing PPP performance and suggest that researchers, governments and the private sector need to look beyond contract terms to properly understand and manage PPP performance.     

Local government amalgamation policy: A highway maintenance evaluation

Evaluating the effects of a change in public policy setting is a critical element in the chain of accountability. Factors such as effectiveness and efficiency in government operations are often difficult to measure. In this study of efficiency outcomes, we follow events before and after significant structural change arising from local authority amalgamation. The study focuses on highway maintenance and uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluate whether greater efficiency was achieved. Results (confined to highway management activities) show no evidence that amalgamation was justified in terms of diseconomies arising from smallness (i.e. increasing returns to scale). While new governance practices introduced contemporaneously lifted the level of performance of local authorities in terms of higher technical efficiency, there is no evidence that the amalgamation policy contributed to this improvement. The policy impact evaluation methodology developed in this paper has potential for application to other local government service activities.     

Revitalising local democracy: A social capital analysis in the context of a New Zealand local authority

Using an exploratory case study, we assess whether markets and strategic performance management systems (SPMS) enhanced social capital of a local authority in New Zealand and its capacity to foster democracy. We found that SPMS enhanced the interaction among managers and between managers and residents and provided residents with opportunities to participate in local authority decision-making. Market forms of management however, promoted individualism and the pursuit of narrow departmental goals. There was increased control by managers and greater reliance on experts which diminished local people's participation (and the role of councillors) in local affairs. The pairing of contradictory discourses based on efficiency, markets and participatory democracy promoted an overly rational form of democracy inimical to a deliberative democracy. The relations between staff were in a state of continuous tension. The paper contributes to an understanding on how the interaction between the state and local authorities affects local authority social capital and the potential effects on community social capital and local democracy. This paper demonstrates a need for greater attention to the contest between different discourses in the construction and sustenance of social capital and the pursuit of democracy.     

Analysing Deprivation and Local Authority Performance: The Implications for CPA

This article uses regression analysis to explore the statistical relationship between deprivation and the performance indicators used for the first round of Comprehensive Performance Assessments (CPAs) for English local authorities. The statistical significance of the results is described and analysed in light of the Audit Commission's decision to exclude deprivation from the CPA framework. For over one third of the PIs tested, deprivation had a statistically significant adverse effect on performance. The author shows that external environmental constraints on local authority performance must be recognized for accurate and equitable performance assessments.     

中国上市公司营运资金管理调查:2010

本调查分别以2010年1945家上市公司、2009-2010年1586家可比上市公司和2008-2010年1306家可比上市公司作为研究对象,进行了营运资金管理绩效的行业分析、企业分析、地区比较分析和外向型行业专题分析,从渠道和要素两个视角对上市公司营运资金管理状况进行了全面调查和透视,得到以下结论:2010年中国上市公司营运资金平均管理绩效与2009年相比有所提高,但提高幅度不大;上市公司各要素单独管理水平相对成熟,协同管理水平较差;从地区视角来看,我国各地区上市公司的营运资金管理水平的差距仍然较大;对于那些外向型程度较高的行业(如纺织服装和电子信息产业等)来说,金融危机后行业的营运资金管理绩效正在逐步回升。