Source: Wall Street Journal (Nov, 9, 1981). Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. 1981 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
CASE 5-2
A VIEW OF ZERO-BASED BUDGETING
Zero-based budgeting emerged as the budget fashion of the latter years of the 1970s. The following article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, just as that system was adopted for federal budget preparation.
Consider These Questions
1. Why did Professor Anthony (a member of the Harvard Business School faculty) view ZBB as a fraud?
2. In this application, could a “fraud” still serve a useful purpose?
Zero-Base Budgeting Is a Fraud
By Robert N. Anthony
Zero-based budgeting is supposed to be a new way of preparing annual budgets, which contrasts with the current way, which is called incremental budgeting. Incremental budgeting, it is correctly said, takes a certain level of expenses as a starting point and focuses on the proposed increment above that level.
By contrast, if the word “zero” means anything, it signifies that the budgeting process starts as zero and that the agency preparing the budget request must justify every dollar that it requests.
There is only one recorded attempt to take such an approach to budgeting in a government organization of any size. In 1971, the governor of Georgia hired a consultant to install such a system. He did so because of and article the consultant had written for Harvard Business Review.
A casual reader of that article could easily get the impression that the author had successfully installed a zero-based budgeting system in a large industrial company. A more careful reader would learn that the author had installed a system in certain staff and research units of that company, comprising an unspecified fraction, but less than 25 percent of the company’s annual expenditures, and that the judgment that the system was a great success was entirely the author’s and based on a single year’s experience.
Anyway, the consultant started to work for the state of Georgia. He was well-intentioned and probably sincere in his belief that it is possible to prepare and analyze a budget from scratch. This belief did not last long. Well before the end of the first budget cycle, it was agreed that expenditures equal to approximately 80 percent of the current level of spending would be given only a cursory examination and that attention would be focused on the increment.
Thus, even before one go around of the new system, the “zero” bench mark was replaced by 80 percent. Moreover, amounts above this floor were in fact “increments” despite the claim that the process is the opposite of incremental budgeting. Eighty percent is a long way from zero and