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This paper questions the validity of allegations by the General Accounting Office in 1979 that OSHA was then allocating more of its resources to investigating worker complaints than the quality of those complaints warranted. Specifically, the author finds that complaint-initiated inspections and "general schedule" inspections (those made on the basis of targeting criteria developed by OSHA) were similarly productive in uncovering safety violations in 1977-79. The findings also suggest that the interindustry distribution of complaints closely matched the distribution of general schedule inspections; complaints were not used by unionized workers as a weapon in negotiations; and the 1980 changes in complaint handling that were enacted in response to the GAO's report did not improve the "yield" of complaint-initiated inspections relative to that of general schedule inspections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on both contingency and institutional theories, this paper examines how professionals in an institutionalized environment are coordinated and controlled and what forces shape the structures organizations adopt for this coordination and control. According to contingency theory, the coordination and control of organizational members is shaped by the task environment and the technical nature of the work they perform, while institutional theory proposes that an organization's need to demonstrate conformity to institutionalized expectations of rational practice also influences its choice of control and coordination mechanisms. We use both theoretical perspectives to develop hypotheses that are tested with data from a study of 96 audit teams in the United States General Accounting Office (GAO). Results show that the more institutionalized the environment, (a) the more the organization relies on a bureaucratic mode of control, (b) the greater the task difficulty and team interdependence and the more the organization relies on personal and group modes of control, and (c) the more the organization relies on personal and group modes of control to improve audit-team performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A model for measuring the efficiency of Decision Making Units (= DMU's) is presented, along with related methods of implementation and interpretation. The term DMU is intended to emphasize an orientation toward managed entities in the public and/or not-for-profit sectors. The proposed approach is applicable to the multiple outputs and designated inputs which are common for such DMU's. A priori weights, or imputations of a market-price-value character are not required. A mathematical programming model applied to observational data provides a new way of obtaining empirical estimates of extremal relations -- such as the production functions and/or efficient production possibility surfaces that are a cornerstone of modern economics. The resulting extremal relations are used to envelop the observations in order to obtain the efficiency measures that form a focus of the present paper. An illustrative application utilizes data from Program Follow Through (= PFT). A large scale social experiment in public school education, it was designed to test the advantages of PFT relative to designated NFT (= Non-Follow Through) counterparts in various parts of the U.S. It is possible that the resulting observations are contaminated with inefficiencies due to the way DMU's were managed en route to assessing whether PFT (as a program) is superior to its NFT alternative. A further mathematical programming development is therefore undertaken to distinguish between "management efficiency" and "program efficiency." This is done via procedures referred to as Data Envelopment Analysis (= DEA) in which one first obtains boundaries or envelopes from the data for PFT and NFT, respectively. These boundaries provide a basis for estimating the relative efficiency of the DMU's operating under these programs. These DMU's are then adjusted up to their program boundaries, after which a new inter-program envelope is obtained for evaluating the PFT and NFT programs with the estimated managerial inefficiencies eliminated. The claimed superiority of PFT fails to be validated in this illustrative application. Our DEA approach, however, suggests the additional possibility of new approaches obtained from PFT-NFT combinations which may be superior to either of them alone. Validating such possibilities cannot be done only by statistical or other modelings. It requires recourse to field studies, including audits (e.g., of a U.S. General Accounting Office variety) and therefore ways in which the results of a DEA approach may be used to guide such further studies (or audits) are also indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of papers in the March 1940 issue of the journal The Accounting Review, dealing with Federal accounting and auditing, have been prepared by persons familiar with practices now being followed and are both descriptive and critical in character. These papers will furnish a background for accountants who desire to know something about Federal accounting procedures, and it is hoped that they may in some degree crystallize the broad criticisms which have frequently been leveled at theories of Federal fiscal responsibility: many of which have been inherited from the days of intellectual Alexander Hamilton. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 placed the responsibility for the accounting systems of the government in the hands of a Comptroller General who as head of the United States General Accounting Office was made independent of current administrations. But the U.S. Congress neglected to provide adequate machinery to control the activities of the Comptroller. Under existing law, it may be worth noting that the person accountable for expenditures of Federal departments is not even the administrator but the lowly "disbursing officer," an employee of the administrator charged with the duty of paying obligations incurred by others.

It is the purpose of this paper to discuss some of the outstanding problems of organization and procedure in the conduct of the accounting functions of the national government above the departmental level, that is to say, of central accounting and control as distinguished from the fiscal administration of individual operating agencies. The theme of this paper is the development of improved practices, and while few citizens are interested in forms of government as such, abstracted from the results they tend to foster, significant progress toward essential improvements in practice in this field is inextricably bound up with changes in the machinery of central financial control. Present practices are the logical result of present organization. The starting point is, then, an analysis of that system. The reorganization bills before the U.S. Congress in 1938 contained sweeping proposals deigned to meet the kind of difficulties that have been noticed here: the divorce of control and audit, vesting the one in an executive agency and the other in an independent office safeguarded as the Comptroller General now is; and the establishment of a Congressional Joint Committee on Public Accounts.

The article refers to studies by Poole and Pierce concerning the United States Federal Reserve Board and focuses on the monetary policy of Chairman Arthur Burns in the 1970s. The central bank is characterized as having a penchant for secrecy and obfuscation. The agency's stance against an audit by the General Accounting Office, Freedom of Information, and Government in the Sunshine is attributed to distrust of the legislative branch of government and efforts to preserve the Federal Reserve's independence. Topics include the Federal Reserve's short-run perspective on monetary policy and how it affected interest rates, the money supply, and forecasts of the gross national product.

This article presents response from the authors to the criticism of their article on the concept of social accounting, published in the April 1973 issue of the journal "The Accounting Review." The primary purpose of the authors' paper was to clarify the concept of social accounting. The authors agrees that the accounting literature does indeed reflect a misunderstanding of the most feasible role of accountants in the evaluation of the effectiveness of social programs (EESP). Moreover, the literature reflects the fact that accountants have also misunderstood the purposes and objectives of social accounting and thus of EESP. One can only speculate about the extent to which these conceptual misunderstandings have contributed to the ill-conceived suggestions concerning most feasible roles. But a U.S. General Accounting Office report cited simply reinforce the authors' view that accountants have neither the training nor the experience necessary to conduct nonfinancial program evaluation or to steer the social accounting bandwagon or to evaluate the effectiveness of the management and operation of social programs.

The article presents the response of Professor J. Rotblat on the criticism of his article on the review of the U.S. General Accounting Office report on a controversy concerning the termination of a research contract held by Dr. Thomas Mancuso by Robert Alvarez. Rotblat informed that one of the essential points in his review was to direct attention to the inequity of granting research contracts to committed institutions.

This paper uses a unique survey of 205 child care centers conducted by the U.S. General Accounting Office to estimate flexible-form cost functions for child care. Our model allows us to estimate the tradeoff between cost and such quality factors as the child/staff ratio, child group size, and staff characteristics. The coefficient on the child/staff ratio indicates that decreasing the average child/staff ratio from, for instance, an 11 to 1 ratio to a 10 to 1 ratio, would lead lo an increase in costs of roughly 3.4 percent. Staff turnover, education, and experience also had statistically significant effects on cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the influence accounting has had on the various elements of society. The significant roles those various elements have played on accounting should not be underestimated. For example, accounting, some writers say, had a considerable impact on the industrial revolution. Others have stated that the investment of great quantities of foreign capital in the U.S. after the Civil War had a consequential influence on what accounting is today. Accounting as a means for providing information for better government for the citizens of the U.S. is well accepted. But, the federal government also has played an essential role in providing an environment for the changing products of accounting. This influence, what the government has had on accounting and accounting on the government, can provide a perspective of accounting from a different viewpoint. In this paper, this perspective is seen from the standpoint of the many departments, agencies, and corporations of the federal government but with special reference to one agency, the U.S. General Accounting Office.

Synthesizing agency theory and prospect theory, we examined the effects of stock-based incentives on CEO earnings manipulation behaviors. In analyses of data compiled from the public companies listed in Compustat's Executive Compensation Database and a U.S. General Accounting Office restatements database, we found that CEOs were more likely to manipulate firm earnings when they had more out-of-the-money options and lower stock ownership. Firm performance and CEO tenure interacted with out-of-the-money options and ownership to influence CEO earnings manipulation behaviors. Our findings inform agency-based views by providing evidence that, under certain conditions, stock-based managerial incentives lead to incentive misalignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes reports on biennial budgeting and the reform of the budget process of the U.S. federal government. The U.S. General Accounting Office report is a review of state government use of biennial budget processes. The report of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Operations is a compilation of the issues and recent testimony on 19 budget reform proposals. It is important to note that the state trend is clearly toward annual rather than biennial budgeting.

The State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972 appropriates $30.2 billion over five years to 38,000 state and local units of general-purpose government in the U.S. Under a grant from the Ford Foundation, the Brookings Institution has been monitoring the distributional, fiscal, and political effects of this program. The second of these three categories--fiscal effects--involves studying the uses of these funds by recipient state and local governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Payment limits have played an important role in U.S. farm policy deliberations for the last thirty years. Current limits are largely nonbinding. Proposals to strengthen and enforce limits are currently in discussion. We evaluate the likely effects of such proposals on acreage for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice in several important producing states. Our results generally indicate that payment limits are unlikely to significantly affect acreage in most cases; exceptions occur for cotton and rice, where the probability that limits would be binding is much greater and thus more likely to affect production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A report issued by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) in 2003 identified auditors' industry expertise as a critical factor for firms choosing an auditor, and highlighted the extreme levels of auditor concentration in some industries. We posit that the investment opportunity set (IOS) plays a fundamental role in determining whether an industry is an attractive target for auditor specialization. When industry-specific IOS is high, specialist auditors make costly investments in industry-specific knowledge, allowing them to offer a differentiated product and to create entry barriers for other audit firms. When the IOS of firms within an industry is relatively homogeneous, auditors can transfer such knowledge across clients in the industry more easily, resulting in cost savings and scale economies. However, greater homogeneity of IOS in an industry can also increase a client's aversion to sharing an auditor with its competitors because of concerns about transfers of proprietary information, suggesting that industries with relatively homogeneous IOS are less likely to be dominated by a single auditor. We show that auditor concentration in an industry relates positively to both the level and homogeneity of IOS in the industry, while auditor dominance relates negatively to industry 105 homogeneity. Further, we find that audit fees are positively associated with both levels and homogeneity of industry IOS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levinson (1998) finds that large states with lenient balanced budget rules experience less cyclical variability. He concludes that state fiscal policy works. However, Levinson's finding is not robust to alternative methods of detrending the data. In addition, the 1984 Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) analysis of state budget rules used by Levinson (and other researchers) is of questionable merit. Reestimation of Levinson's regressions using budget rule classifications in a U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) study reverses his result. The results from this study suggest that existing empirical work using the ACIR index should be revisited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two key organizational properties have long been studied: (I) the manner in which instrumental work processes are performed, and (2) the symbolic display of rational practice in response to institutional pressures. However, the relationship between these properties has proven to he contentious. For example. at different times, the sociology of professions. institutional theory aid loose coupling perspectives have proposed that they should be decoupled and then loosely coupled with one another. Extending beyond these contending propositions, it has also been reasoned that a duality inheres in many elements of organizational structure such that they may be simultaneously instrumental and symbolic in chancier. To evaluate the relationship among institutional pressures, instrumental work processes and coordination practices. we administered a questionnaire to audit teams in the US General Accounting Office (GAO). Statistical results, augmented with field interviews, suggest that instrumental work processes are loosely coupled with, rather than decoupled from, institutional pressures aid their attendant symbolic displays of rational practice. Extending beyond the loose coupling concept, we also Found that institutional pressures incite the symbolic facets of instrumental tasks and coordination practices. while GAO professional activities both embody and incite the instrumental facets of institutional pressures. Implications for future research in alternative organizational contexts are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on auditing in the U.S. Federal Government. The audit of governmental and charitable enterprises differs only from the audit of a commercial organization as the individual requirements may dictate. There is the same necessity in government and institutional auditing for the authentication of financial statements and validation of whatever fiscal procedure may have been employed. It is equal, necessary that financial trusts be discharged in government and institutions. The primary difference between business and government may be stated, in simplest accounting terms, to the effect that business seeks to render a service based upon the profit motive, while in government the profit motive is absent. The government of the United States is the greatest single enterprise ever assembled by mankind, and yet it is not so unique as to require a different statement of the rule. Indeed, the very magnitude and heterogeneity of its operations are such as to call even more imperatively for a clear understanding and application of basic principles.