Watchdogs' Performance Indicators: the Case of the Brazilian Supreme Audit Institution

Abstract

This paper describes the Brazilian Supreme Audit Institution (Brazilian Court of Audit)’s usage of performance indicators for performance reporting purposes. The SAI is concerned with its own reporting to the public and to the government, and in order to support this process those organizations adopt a. valid set of performance indicators, which seems to have been influenced by a perspective change from a compliance-oriented to a result-oriented audit. Following Barzelay (1997) and Pollitt & Summa (1997), we applied content analysis to the Brazilian court’s annual reports (1993-2009), identifying the characteristics of 200 different indicators and how those indicators were presented and used in each report. We discuss the impact of bias and uncertainty on the set of indicators and on the Court’s performance communication strategy. Our results show that output indicators still orient indicator usage and report policy. Furthermore, weak comparability among sets of annual indicators, non-explained variation of indicators’ content and metrics, and the absence of any performance analysis in the reports reduce accountability. Nevertheless, the disclosure policy has been evolving over the last ten years. The analyses also discuss some implications for the public sector performance measurement literature.