Editorial: Unhealthy obsession with paper

Dwayne Crombie is not the first chief executive to leave a district health board with a parting shot at the absurd amount of paper he has had to produce. "The amount of compliance and auditing and monitoring is gobsmacking," he said. "It has become an industry in itself, and I wonder if some of it is more about protecting people's risks rather than really making a difference. It takes a huge amount of resources."

Every executive in the state service will know what he means. Every contracted social work agency, every school principal, will shout a hearty "hear, hear". These people spend a great deal of their time not serving the people who need their help but writing largely formulaic reports for officials in Wellington who file these things.

This is called accountability in the public sector. Mr Crombie, like many before him, is moving happily to the private sector where accountability is much more straightforward, even in healthcare. If a private hospital or rest home has a healthy balance sheet, it has probably provided a satisfactory service, especially if alternatives were available to its patients or residents.

But those are tests of profitability and competition - profane terms to upholders of so-called public service principles. Having decided that money cannot be the measure of quality and access, they have had to devise written measures. These usually take the form of statements of goals and objectives, each with regular reporting requirements.

When every conceivable aspect of the organisation's activities has to be monitored and reported to an oversight bureau, the organisation can spend half its life on accountability.

It would not be so bad if public service goals and objectives were concrete things, measurable by numbers, but they seldom are. In many cases, they are not even specific tasks. They are broad resolutions of public good, motherhood and apple pie that can be satisfied by an accepted formula of words. Every public administrator learns the required language. It is language designed not to tell anyone very much, and officialdom is content with that.

Mr Crombie is no doubt correct in his suspicion that much of it is required simply to protect someone's risk. So long as officials see that reports are received when due, with i's dotted and t's crossed, their work is done. So long as the reporting requirements have been met, they cannot be blamed if something goes wrong.

It is easier to condemn this culture than to change it. Each specific paper exercise is an attempt to meet a genuine need. The state does need to know that services are functioning as they should and taxpayers' money is being spent for the intended purpose. But paper trails are not always a reliable guide to those ends. And it is time somebody calculated how much of the state's annual budget was expended in reporting on its use.

Better accountability was a prime purpose of public sector reform in the 1980s, and it worked for former departments such as the Post Office, Airways Corporation, Coalcorp and many others. They were given a single solid commercial focus and they responded, improving their value to the public in every respect. In the 1990s, attempts were made to put the largest state services, health and education, on to a similar competitive commercial footing. But they were never better than hybrids of public and corporate administration and the paperwork required of them was if anything worse than before.

Trust is the only antidote to all this paper. With a little more trust, we could release good people from accountability to filing clerks and keep them on the job.