[Previously published in March, 2003]
The meaning of public accountability argued in the Citizen’s Guide is based on the definition of accountability given in the 1975 Report of the Independent Review Committee on the Office of the Auditor General of Canada (Wilson Committee):
“Accountability in its simplest terms is the obligation to answer for a responsibility that has been conferred.”
The Committee’s chairman, JRM Wilson, FCA, was intellectually rigorous and Canada’s most respected chartered accountant. In the business world, for example, the whole point of more than 100 years of audited public financial reporting is that it isn’t good enough to assign responsibility, hope people will accept it and be diligent, and then police conduct. And it is unrealistic to rely on self-regulation, however policed, without having those with the responsibilities themselves report on the discharge of their responsibilities and without having their reporting reliably and publicly validated. The Enrons showed this, but the US legislative and SEC responses have not included statutory public answering obligations (see the article on the SEC and US accounting profession in this Journal).
The problem is that writers have tended to attach “accountability” as a label for whatever they want to see people do or not do. The usefulness of the Wilson definition is that it distinguishes the answering obligation, which is a reporting obligation, from responsibility, which is the obligation to act. If responsibility or the acceptance of it is treated as synonymous with accountability, the emphasis will tend to be placed on people’s responsibilities rather than their obligation to answer publicly, as a self-regulating influence.
Chapter 2 of the Citizen’s Guide and this web site explains that without a clear public reporting requirement we won’t get the reporting, and without the reporting we lose the self-regulating effect of accountable people in authority having to publicly state their intentions, reasons and performance and have their assertions publicly validated for their fairness and completeness (i.e., checked for lying, in the sense of any intentionally deceptive message that is stated). So here is a case where a difference in definition makes an important difference in whether citizens are likely to use the powerful lever of exacting validated answering for responsibilites.
Thus, to be useful in society, accountability must not mean taking action to do something, such as compliance with a directive, or the taking-on of responsibilities. But full and fair public answering can show that a responsibility has been genuinely taken on. Nor can accountability be defined as “a relationship where…”, because a relationship is not an obligation. Talking about accountability as something other than a reporting and explaining obligation plays into the hands of authorities who wish to cloud their responsibilities and to avoid having to say publicly what they think their responsibilities are and whether they think they have met them.
A mid-1990s literature review of notions of accountability by the Canadian Comprehensive Auditing Foundation showed that people’s definitions of accountability were all over the map. That is still the case.
As cited in the Citizen’s Guide, UK public sector researchers Patricia Day and Rudolf Klein stated in 1987, in Accountabilities: Five Public Services:
“It is a tradition of political thought which sees the defining characteristic of democracy as stemming not merely from the election of those who are given delegated power to run society’s affairs … but from their continuing obligation to explain and justify their conduct in public.”
University of Toronto professor Philip Stenning, editor of Accountability for Criminal Justice: Selected Essays (1995), states at the outset that accountability is the idea that “people, governments and business should be held publicly answerable.” Stenning cites and supports the Concise Oxford Dictionary’s definition of accountability as being liable or bound to give an account. But he notes that some scholars have taken accountability instead to mean the ability to give an account, which doesn’t mean the obligation to report.
Another example is the web site of the Voluntary Sector Knowledge Network (www.vskn.ca). It states,as at March 2003:
“More and more these days nonprofit organizations are being asked to show that the work they do ‘makes a difference’ — that they are achieving the mission for which they were created. When they do this, they are said to be accountable.”
Apart from possible minor confusion from VSKN equating doing something with showing something, their notion gets it right: to “show” something will imply reporting something.
Not helpful is the 1999 Report of the Panel on Accountability and Governance in the Voluntary Sector (Broadbent report), which defined accountability as follows:
“Accountability is the requirement to explain and accept responsibility for carrying out an assigned mandate in light of agreed upon expectations.”
The requirement to explain is accountability, but accepting responsibility has nothing conceptually to do with an answering obligation. Moreover, “assigned mandate” sounds as if it is directed to employee management. There is still the question of dealing with the public accountability of those overseeing the assigning and agreeing. A nonprofit organization board of directors and/or its members can be said to do the assigning, but who then has the management control responsibility (and the attaching public accountability for diligence in control) to see that the decided mandate will produce fairness in the organization’s impact on citizens? That is the only problem with the 1975 Wilson definition: limiting answering to responsibilities “conferred” doesn’t include accountability for people’s actions affecting the public in important ways that lie outside what has been formally conferred. But Wilson was dealing with government-to-Parliament accountability based on statutes.
The Panel did not explain why it abandoned its earlier 1998 Discussion Paper definition of accountability (for which it had the Wilson definition) that stated:
“Accountability is the obligation to explain how a responsibility for an assigned mandate has been discharged”.
The Panel’s earlier definition did not muddle concepts.
University of Toronto professor Janice Gross Stein, in her 2001 Massey Lectures, “The Cult of Efficiency,” uses the word “accountability” nearly a dozen times in the first 10 pages but did not define what she meant . And what one can infer as her meaning with each mention of “accountability” produces no consistent conceptual pattern. Yet one would think that the early training of professors would require them always to define their terms at the outset if they expect readers to read on.
And JRM Wilson would not have condoned the accommodation and lack of rigour in the definition of accountability in the public sector offered by the Auditor General of Canada to the Canadian Parliament in December 2002, in the “Main points” section of a 20-page report on accountability. The Auditor General is the intellectual bodyguard for Parliament in matters of accountability:
“Accountability is a relationship based on obligations to demonstrate, review, and take responsibility for performance, both the results achieved in light of agreed expectations and the means used”
The assertion that accountability is a “relationship based on” X, Y and Z appears at odds with the assertion by Day and Klein and Wilson that accountability is an obligation to answer. Saying that something is a relationship doesn’t say what it actually is, although text following the definition talks about reporting performance. The text of the AG’s report cannot be expected to imply a definition if the formal asserted definition is not rigorous. (This is like an auditor describing the scope of an audit as, “We looked at…” rather than saying what the auditor actually did). There seems to be a word or words missing from the Auditor General’s definition, but nowhere in the definition does there appear to be a statement clear enough to teach members of Parliament what accountability really is and guide them in installing adequate answering government obligations and exacting the needed answering.
In Section 9.12 of the report the Auditor General asserts: “Accountability is not a simple concept.” In fact, the concept is simple, as the Day-Klein-Wilson definition suggests, and as the Citizen’s Guide attempts to demonstrate. If anything is complicated, it is the task of getting citizens and elected representatives to grasp the power of holding fairly to account to bring about fairness, and to exact adequate answering from authorities — to have them “explain and justify their conduct in public.” Rather than being titled, “Modernizing Accountability in the Public Sector,” (which suggests that there has been meaningful accountability but it just needs “modernizing”), the study would have been better scoped as, “Installing Adequate Answering By the Government of Canada.”
In the media, there are dozens of examples of writers implying or stating what accountability is and being unhelpful. The result is a citizenry thus far being given no clear and useful definition of public accountability. Hence the Guide and this web site. The result of laying fog over the concept of accountability is citizens not knowing how to hold to account, and the result of that is continuing needless harm in society.
