The 1980s saw an expansion of discourses and
practices that promoted the importance of performance
measurement in the private and public sectors.
Accountants were significantly involved in
building a network of people and resources to support
the idea of the value of performance measurement.
Papers urged accountants to expand their
domain to include non-financial measures of performance
(e.g., Kaplan, 1984). Associations were
formed to organize the profession’s efforts at
expanding accountant’s jurisdiction in the measurement
of government performance, such as the
Canadian Comprehensive Auditing Foundation
(CCAF).14 Around the same time, legislative bodies
in a number of jurisdictions became increasingly
interested in the ideas that came to be known as
NPM. For example, in 1985, Western Australia
required government organizations to report on
performance indicators (CCAF, 1996), and the
USA introduced the National Performance Review
legislation in 1993 (National Performance Review,
1993; Thompson, 2000). But, it is only after the
mid 1990s, that a general interest in managing for
results moves the further step towards requiring
accountants to provide credibility to performance
measures, and necessitates the construction of a
legitimate claim that auditors have the expertise to
verify measures of pollution, health status, satisfaction
with government services, and so on.