Article 64. Getting Efficient Government Through Enhanced Auditing
I have defined “Enhanced Auditing” as increasing the state auditing responsibility from protecting public funds and property to protecting public resources in general. This would add the waste resulting from lost man hours and would define lost man hours as a waste of public resources. Governments have generally overlooked waste in man hours because it is often mistakenly thought that one of the states responsibilities is to provide jobs. I would argue that it is not the states responsibility to provide jobs while it is the states responsibility to do all it can do to bring jobs to the private sector. The reason is simply that unnecessary public jobs absorb tax dollars that can be more efficiently used elsewhere while private sector jobs increase tax dollars.
The reason that current state auditing practices can be easily adapted to enhanced auditing is that it is an established part of all state governments and is accepted as a watchdog of state funds and property. The added responsibility for monitoring waste in man hours would require the addition of time study auditors. Although the state auditing function would require increased funding the payoff can be as much as five times the expenditure for the time study auditors. With the current waste in some bureaucracies there is an enormous potential for savings in tax dollars.
One of the first problems to be encountered is the rules and regulations set by bureaucracies and employee unions. Bureaucracies and employee unions have both worked to set unnecessary rules that encourage inefficiency in order to guarantee employment. If it can be established that these rules and regulations were enacted to purposely create the inefficient use of man hours then they may actually be illegal because of the resulting loss in public resources. Time study auditors are tasked to time study a function’s processes determine the correct staffing level and implement the revised work methods. If the rules governing employment are found to be incompatible with the revised work methods then they should be discarded or declared illegal.
For more on enhanced auditing see Article 62. “Enhanced Auditing A Tool for Government Reform”.
