Policy Evaluation and Government Auditing

Abstract

Strengthening of policy evaluation is an innovative element of the current administrative reform in the Japanese central government. The reform aims at transforming planning and procedure oriented management into result oriented management. However, it is still unclear about the interrelation between internal and external controls including auditing and evaluation, since the focus is internal evaluation. It is also vague in the evaluating targets and the compatibility between ensuring accountability and improving efficiency and quality of service. On the other hand, government audits in the developed countries have generally moved their manpower from traditional compliance auditing into performance or policy evaluation since the 1980s. The Board of Audit in Japan is not exceptional. Also it is noteworthy that government audits would play an additional (partly original) role in certificating the performance indicators (PIs) under the new public management (NPM) which has recently influenced the Japanese public sector reforms. It is assumed that PIs are considered the mediating signals corresponding to the prices in the competitive market between the public as customers and service providers as suppliers , and monitoring evaluation plays a significant role; market mechanism could function when there is the symmetry of information between customers or consumers and suppliers. However, internal evaluation might not examine the merits of policy objectives or the policy framework. Therefore, it is necessary for successful reform that government auditing implements the complementary evaluation on these areas in addition to examining the monitoring evaluation of government agencies, while the approach is not easy because of its political neutrality.