CHALLENGES TO ENSURING PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY

Government service (planning, funding, and providing services directly to citizens) is thus evolving into public facilitation and governance—the provision of public services through a network of public, private, and nonprofit actors. This change in the manner that government delivers services is partly the result of an aging workforce (half of all top U.S. civil service executives are over 50), but mostly the result of deliberate policy at the national level to reduce the number of federal employees despite expanding public responsibilities. Public governance requires a new type of public leadership—leadership that engages the “para-public sector” (nonprofit and for-profit organizations that operate primarily on government contracts) while maintaining public accountability (Kee, Forrer, and Gabriel 2007).

We now speak less about government and more about governance. The trend in public sector employment has been to hire fewer full-time employees, especially at the federal level, and instead to contract out government jobs to the private sector. As Paul Light has alerted us, “the shadow government” continues to grow because our governments hire more and more contractors (Light 2006). As of 2002, Light estimated the number of contractors to be double that of full-time federal employees. “Doing more with less” frequently means doing more with contract employees or through a variety of contractual relationships with private and nonprofit organizations.

One of the most significant challenges in the leadership of complex networks is the issue of public accountability. Public accountability is the process by which public servants balance the interests of participating private market and nongovernmental organizations and government agencies in the provision of public services while maintaining a sense of accountability to the public being served. Under this concept, the public or nonprofit manager serves as facilitator between the public and the private/nonprofit sector. The manager is tasked with upholding the public interest while accruing the benefits of service provision via the para-public network of for-profit, nonprofit, and faith-based providers. These complicated delivery systems make ensuring accountability for both process and performance especially challenging.

In the nonprofit sector, new legal requirements also have led to increased oversight by boards of trustees and oversight and audit committees. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, for example, was enacted in 2002 in response to private sector corporate and accounting scandals such as Enron and Tyco. Although only a couple of its provisions specifically apply to nonprofit organizations, the act serves as “a wake-up call to the entire nonprofit community. Indeed, several state legislatures have already passed or are considering legislation containing elements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to be applied to nonprofit organizations” (Board Source and Independent Sector 2006). In response to the act, many nonprofit organizations are proactively taking steps to change their financial practices and enhance the transparency and accountability of their financial results.