GAO Self-Audits

It makes sense that the Government Accountability Office would do a strong internal audit, given that checking in on other people's goals is what they do best. And given that they're a small agency, it's easier for them to aggregate and explain some of their goals, particularly in areas like human capital. When your goal is to hire 345 people in 2009, it's not extremely hard to figure out that you hired 340. It's not hard to figure out that you have a 94 percent retention rate (if you don't include retirements) with a similarly small staff, either.

The whole exercise makes me wonder about the wisdom of reporting requirements. It seems to me that there needs to be a balance between the value of compliance and the resources required to do comprehensive reporting on human capital goals, or any other subject. The goal of reporting requirements ought to be not simply measurement of trends but compliance with requirements: you ought to be reporting to prove, for example, you're making progress in the number of veterans you're hiring, or the fact that you're improving your retention rates. If reporting requirements consume enormous amounts of agency resources but don't actually act as an incentive for agencies, they may not be worth it.

There is a value, of course, in keeping track of agencies things continue to do poorly at. But those statistics are only useful if there's work going on behind those numbers to figure out why agencies aren't improving. Numbers are just numbers. If there are good processes attached to them, that's when they become meaningful.