Recall that initially, when the Office and the AFRC pushed for performance measurement and a central role for auditors, public servants initially had serious reservations about the Office’s expertise, and many felt threatened by the Office’s potential powers:
There has been a lot of talk over the last two years [i.e., 1994 and 1995] or so that the Auditor General was going to be the performance measurer with a big stick. And that there were going to be all sorts of efficiency auditors, for lack of a better term, who were going to come in from the Auditor General’s Office, and they were going to not only audit the financial side of things, they were going to audit performance measures and everything. […] And you were going to be held accountable on the spot, if you said you were going to do this, and you had not done it, why had you not done it. And right down the line. And right down to the individual employee. And that was the rather draconian view of the world coming from some quarters, that the Auditor General would have that kind of scope. (Division manager, March 1996)