We don’t want to start commenting on the
relevancy of the measures until there is some
stability to it. Otherwise you are ending up
qualifying the [auditor’s] report and that is
viewed as non-constructive. New Zealand’s
experience was that it was a very destructive
process. So [the state auditor in] New Zealand
went into this with the view of issuing
a full-blown report on all aspects of performance
measurement. And they hit the relevancy
issue. Apart from trying to understand what that means, they found that they qualified every report that they issued, and they had a very big negative reaction to that. (Office auditor, January 1998)