While the beneficial aspects of a public accounting office’s activity are not disputed here, it is argued in this article that four major distortions are produced: the concern with administrative rationality overlooks costs elsewhere (Section 2); budgetary aspects are overvalued compared to other issues (Section 3); incentives-oriented behavior is suppressed (Section 4); and the evaluation is biased by concentrating on minor, instead of major, aspects of inefficiency (Section 5). Section 6 considers alternatives to public accounting offices and makes some suggestions for new institutional arrangements particularly for constitutional rules.
Frey, B. S. (1994). Supreme auditing institutions: a politico-economic analysis. European Journal of Law and Economics, 1(3), 169-176.
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01552468
