Onker N. Basu UNIVERSITY OF AKRON

THE INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTS OF LEADERSHIP: THE UNITED STATES GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE AND ITS AUDIT REPORT REVIEW PROCESS

Abstract: In accounting research, the role of organizational leaders has been undcrrepresented. The limited research dealing with leadership issues has focused on the impact of leadership on micro activities such as performance evaluation, budget satisfaction, and audit team performance. The impact of leadership on the structure of accounting and audit systems and organizations has been ignored.

This paper focuses on the impact that past Comptrollers General have had on the working and structure of one federal audit agency, the United States General Accounting Office (GAO). In addition, it also focuses on the influence of the two most recent Comptrollers General on one important audit related activity, i.e., the audit report review process. Using qualitative field research methods, this paper documents how the organizational leadership impacts its longterm audit practices and thereby influences auditing, especially in the public sector.

Few would question that leadership has an effect on the goals and structure of complex organizations [Galaskiewicz and Shatin, 1981, p. 434].

The effect of organizational leadership on an organization’s structure and processes has been documented in the management literature [see for e.g., Kanter, 1977; Granovetter, 1974]. More recently, the management literature has observed that the study of organizational leadership is worthy of concern [Cunningham, 1992] due to the impact that these leaders have on the work processes of organizations. Organizational leaders often have ideological patterns [Covey, 1991] which are imbued

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and insightful comments.

in organizational structures and processes, thereby affecting quality management [Farguhar, 1991], organizational performance [Hoffman, 1989] and ultimately, the survival of the organization itself [Hasenfeld and Schmid, 1989].

In accounting, the effect of leadership has been examined with reference to budgeting issues [Brownwell, 1983] and performance evaluation [Hopwood, 1974]. In the auditing arena, leadership has been studied with particular focus on its effects on audit team performance, audit task complexity [Jiambalvo and Pratt, 1982] and dysfunctional auditor behavior [Kelley and Margheim, 1990]. However, this prior work had focused on auditing in the private sector. In contrast, there has been relatively little research on examining the effects of leadership in public sector auditing.

The United States General Accounting Office (GAO) is an extremely important audit organization whose oversight activities cover all agencies that receive federal funding (except the Central Intelligence Agency). That includes the $4 trillion public debt, the $1.5 trillion federal budget and the $250 million annual interest on the debt. The chief executive officer of the GAO is known as the Comptroller General. As the leader of such an organization, the Comptroller General has the ability and opportunity to influence the structure and direction of the audit activities of the GAO. In particular, with reference to the researcher’s fieldwork, past Comptrollers General have placed a great deal of attention on modifying the primary vehicle with which the GAO communicates with such external constituents as Congress and the press.

This primary vehicle is in the form of audit reports which are important to Congress as support for testimonies relating to the effective discharge of its stewardship function. This is documented by their use, in as many as 217 testimonies in 1989 [GAO, 1989] and 306 in 1990 [GAO, 1990] an increased demand of 41% in one year. According to Walker [1986, p. 131], these audit reports also allow members of Congress to claim credit in the eyes of the press and others for identifying and acting on pervasive problems in government. The press, in turn, uses GAO audit reports as an information source on government operations.

The first draft of the audit report is essentially a team effort that almost exclusively involves only the audit team members located in the practitioner component of the professional bureaucracy [Freidson, 1986; MIntzberg, 1979]. Thereafter, this first draft goes through a review process by such members of the administrative component [Freidson, 1986] as the report review staff within divisions and the offices outside of the division such as the Office of General Counsel (OGC), and the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE). It is during this process that the report is modified and refined into a final product.

In 1978, a task force of the Government Oversight Committee, chaired by Congressman Jack Brooks, reported on the GAO’s view of report review by commenting that “each proposed report must be reviewed at appropriate levels within the office, to make sure that it is of high quality and that it conforms to their approved policies and standards” [p. 33]. It was this task force that identified lack of report timeliness as being a major complaint against the GAO. On this subject, a member of the GAO History Program who participated in the study observed, “the audit report review process has often been considered the cause of lack of timeliness by the GAO in presentation of its reports.” The member also said, “Because people outside are scrutinizing the reports, the GAO would rather be right and late than on time and wrong.” The emphasis on being “right” has manifested itself in the rigorous audit report review process of the GAO.

The purpose of this study is twofold. One purpose is to examine the influence of past Comptrollers General on the overall workings of the GAO. The second purpose is to examine the influence of the two most recent Comptrollers General (i.e., Elmer Staats and Charles Bowsher) on one of the more important activities of the GAO, i.e., the audit report review process.

RESEARCH CONTEXT AND METHODS
Research Context

The United States GAO, headed by the Comptroller General of the United States, was formed by Congress in 1921 as a result of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. It was intended to be an independent, nonpartisan agency whose purpose was to assist in Congressional oversight of the executive branch of the Federal government. In the United States, the Constitution gives final authority over public finances to Congress. The GAO is responsible to the Congress to provide information it needs about the safeguarding and administration of public funds. This assistance takes the form of audits, which serve as preventive control by identifying illegality, fraud, waste, extravagance, and reports on the soundness of policies, programs, and projects [Brown, 1970, p. 9].

As Charles A. Bowsher, Comptroller General of the United States (GAO, 1987), observed:

… as an arm of the Congress, GAO’s basic mission is to look for ways in which the government can better and more efficiently meet the needs of the people.
The GAO, as an organization, has received relatively little research scrutiny. Rourke [1978] attributed this lack of academic attention to the image of the GAO as an agency concerned exclusively with routine fiscal auditing. However, the GAO now undertakes audits of a general policyoriented nature such as the evaluation of programs in terms of efficiency and conforming to legislative intent.

Research Methods

The current study could be classified as a qualitative interpretive fieldbased study which attempts to solicit the interpretations and impressions of important organizational actors involved in the GAO audit report review process concerning events that have already taken place. In addition, the researcher used unobtrusive techniques such as archival analysis to capture the formal, documented aspects of this process.

Interviews

One of the most important aspects of field research is gaining access to the setting of interest [Berg, 1989]. Toward this end, the researcher had conducted semistructured interviews with GAO employees at various levels in two phases of data gathering. The purpose of these early interviews was to gain a general understanding of the institutional and the technical environments of the GAO and to establish personal contact based upon which the second phase could be founded. During the first phase, interviews were sporadic and were preceded and followed by extensive research on the GAO and available documentation. Before the second phase of the study (i.e., the fieldwork) could be initiated, extensive telephone interviews were conducted with such individuals as the Associate Director of one GAO Division as to who would function as a liaison for the study and how the study was to be conducted. It was important and necessary to have a liaison office to legitimize the activities of the researcher in the eyes of the organizational participants and also to facilitate the data gathering process.

Intensive and extensive interviews were then conducted with a sample of members of the GAO spanning all levels involved with the audit report review process. These members included the seniormost members of the GAO such as Charles H. Bowsher, the Comptroller General of the GAO, Elmer Staats, the former Comptroller General of the GAO (19661981), Assistant Comptroller Generals, Directors, and Assistant Directors down to senior evaluators and evaluators. These individuals spanned a variety of functions, ranging from the practitioner and administrative components within the divisions sampled, to the administrative components outside of these divisions. In addition, members outside the GAO such as press reporters, Congressional staffers, and agency officials were interviewed to provide an outside perspective as to the audit report review process and audit reports.

Archival Analysis

To add strength to the data gathered during the interview phase, concurrent reviews and studies were undertaken of both private and public archival material. To grasp a more complete understanding of the review process, the “master product folders” of three jobs of three divisions of the GAO were requested. The “master product folder” is a highly confidential file containing, among other things, sets of report drafts with comments from various GAO members as it moves through the review pipeline. As a result of this confidentiality, the GAO members requested that no copies be made of the contents of these folders, a condition to which the researcher adhered.

In addition, newspaper reports in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Washington Post were analyzed to check for any references to the specific GAO audits that were reviewed. The Congressional Record was also reviewed in a similar fashion.

In addition to a review of the newspaper indexes to check for references to specific audits during the period of the audit, the indexes of The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and the Atlanta Constitution were reviewed for a citation count of the GAO press coverage over the past five years.

History of GAO Leadership

To keep the GAO relatively free from political involvement, the two top officials of the GAO, the Comptroller General and the Assistant Comptroller General, have fifteenyear appointments. They are appointed by the President of the United States, subject to Senate confirmation, and are only removable by a joint resolution of Congress for clearly specified reasons. This removal clause allows the GAO leadership to operate independently of executive interference. It was this clause that caused President Woodrow Wilson to veto the Budget and Accounting Act in 1921 [Trask, 1991]. Wilson thought that the power to remove should lie within the President’s office. However, President Harding signed the bill in 1921, thus creating the independent Comptroller General.

Comptroller General John Raymond McCarl

John Raymond McCarl was the first Comptroller General of the GAO. He was a lawyer by profession and therefore looked upon the problem of accounting for public money, not as an accounting problem, but rather as a legal one, where legality was defined by Congressional intent. The authority of the Comptroller General to countersign expenditure warrants made the legality question of paramount importance to agencies. To avoid the embarrassment of being turned down, the agencies consulted with the GAO to make sure that their disbursements conformed with the GAO’s interpretation of Congressional intent.

McCarl, himself, received mixed reviews [Flesher, 1993; Mosher, 1984]. On the one hand, he was lauded for his conformance with the letter of the law. On the other hand, this conformance made him appear to be inflexible and despotic. It was during his tenure that the Division of Law was renamed the Office of General Counsel (OGC) in 1928. In 1930, this legal office had 29 attorneys recovering over a million dollars in debts owed to the United States Government. During McCarl’s tenure, the OGC also prepared as many as 784 reports for Congress and the President, along with over 5,000 legal decisions.

Comptroller General Lindsay Carter Warren

Lindsay Carter Warren was the second longtenure Comptroller General of the GAO and was appointed by Roosevelt in 1940. Warren’s tenure saw two notable events taking place; the first was the New Deal, which resulted in larger problems for the GAO by creating more agencies with larger budgets and greater discretionary powers for public servants [Falker, 1986]. Secondly, America’s participation in World War II sent government expenditures skyrocketing.

After World War II, Warren instituted a number of innovations in the GAO’s mode of operating. He started working with agencies in a more cooperative manner than did his predecessors. Aside from compliance audits, Warren broadened the GAO’s audit functions to review audit systems and management effectiveness of agencies [Flesher and Flesher, 1989]. He did away with the centralization of GAO activities and established the practice of onsite audits. After Congress passed legislation in the early 1940s requiring the GAO to audit military expenditures, Warren established as many as 276 onsite locations for contract audits. This was necessary in order to be able to deal with the volume of payments to be made, claims to be settled from war contractors and armed force members, and auditing of transport payments. He also established regional offices outside of Washington, D.C., both within the country and outside of it, starting with Europe and thereafter in East Asia and Latin America.

Comptroller General Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell was appointed as Comptroller General in 1955. Campbell was an accountant by profession and was first appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission before being nominated by President Eisenhower as the Comptroller General of the GAO. His initial appointment was blocked by Democrats who were not pleased with his involvement while he was with the Atomic Energy Commission in the DixonYates project, an Eisenhower proposal to provide electric power to the city of Memphis by bypassing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and working instead with the Atomic Energy Commission. He was considered to be an extremely tough leader who believed in working through the hierarchy of the organization. He was in tolerant of mistakes and expected to have information about audits at his fingertips.

As a professional accountant, he believed that audits were conducted to identify mistakes and consequently encouraged the GAO auditors to place their emphasis there. Campbell’s audit approach alienated him from both the departments and agencies as well as some elements in Congress who thought that the GAO had become overly aggressive. It was Campbell’s philosophy of trying improve the auditing of defense work that resulted in the rapid increase of reports dealing with defense contracts. This number went up from 48 reports in 1964 to 57 in 1965. However, strongly worded, negatively oriented titles resulted in objections from both the Department of Defense (DOD) and defense contractors [Task, 1991]. This agenda resulted in the Holifield Hearings of 1965 which was chaired by Chester Holifield, a Democrat from California. The hearings expressed a dissatisfaction with the style, format and content of GAO reports; the handling of confidential data, and the naming of officials in reports etc. This report resulted in a change of GAO procedures and, some say, even in leadership. Campbell sought and was granted premature retirement due to illhealth. He was succeeded by Elmer Staats.

Comptroller General Elmer Staats

Elmer Staats was appointed as Comptroller General in 1966. Staats held a doctorate in Public Administration from the University of Minnesota. He was regarded by many to be extremely politically conscious and sensitive to Congressional needs, both Democrat and Republican. Having been a director with the Bureau of Budget (BOB), he was well aware of the workings of Capitol Hill.

Staats believed in better government and instituted program evaluation audits in a more pervasive manner than did his predecessors. Unlike Campbell, Staats did not place as much emphasis on the auditing of defense contracts, preferring to concentrate on evaluation of such social programs, such as the poverty program. Congressional requests were welcomed and personal relationships with Congressional staffers were encouraged. GAO’s services to Congress were expanded by adding advisory services in reviewing and drafting proposed legislation. In addition, Staats broadened the employee expertise at the GAO, consistent with the renewed focus on program auditing, by employing larger numbers of nonaccountants.

Another notable step under Staats’ leadership was the participation in the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) founded in the early 1950s in Vienna, Austria. The INTOSAI is a consortium of supreme audit agencies, like the GAO, from various countries. It currently has a 150 members and holds regular triennial international conferences designed to advance and develop more effective audit approaches in governmental auditing.

In summary, under the Staats leadership, the GAO went a long way toward establishing its legitimacy in the eyes of Congress. Elmer Staats retired in 1981 and was succeeded by Charles Bowsher, the current Comptroller General.

Just before appointing Charles Bowsher in 1981, President Reagan made it a point to emphasize his own administration’s efforts to attack the problem of waste and to acknowledge the GAO’s contribution in this regard. In a memorandum issued to all heads of agencies and departments on March 26, 1981, he said,

I expect each of you to provide the necessary support and cooperation to ensure that our objective is accomplished. One specific action I am asking you to take is to designate a top level individual who will have the responsibility for following up on the recommendations of your official who is responsible for coordinating efforts to eliminate fraud and waste and the recommendation of the General Accounting Office (emphasis added).

Comptroller General Charles H. Bowsher

The current Comptroller General, Charles Bowsher, was appointed by President Reagan on July 9, 1981 for a period of 15 years. Charles Bowsher received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1953 and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1956. He served as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1967 to 1971 where he was in charge of financial management and had fiscal responsibilities of about 20 billion dollars with about 4,500 people working under him. During his tenure as Assistant Secretary, Bowsher had several interactions with members from the GAO, Organization of Management and Budget (OMB), and Congressional Committees.

From 1971 until his appointment to the helm of the GAO, Charles Bowsher was a managing partner with Arthur Andersen & Company in Washington D.C., specializing in the government sector.
Mr. Bowsher has generally followed Elmer Staats’ agenda, continually attempting to improve the image and work processes of the GAO. In recent times, he has been involved with the issue of deficit reduction. In this regard, he observed that

NineteenNinety was the year in which the budget crisis came to dominate the nation’s political agenda. Both in the administration and on Capitol Hill, policy makers finally faced the facts about the deficit. (GAO, 1990, p. 2)

He has encouraged GAO employees to testify before Congress as evidenced by a dramatic 41% increase in the number of testimonies given by GAO employees in 1990 over 1989.
As indicated earlier, one of the purposes of the paper is to examine the influence of the two most recent Comptroller Generals (i.e., Elmer Staats and Charles Bowsher) on the GAO audit report review process. This is discussed in the next section.

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF GAO LEADERSHIP IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AUDIT REPORT REVIEW PROCESS

The Staats Years

Staats headed the General Accounting Office from 1966 till 1981, and much of what the GAO does today is attributed by participants to his leadership initiative. During an intensive interview conducted as part of the current research, Mr. Staats recounted that, after terms at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Program Planning and Budget (PPB), he took over the GAO with a view to ascertaining how best the GAO could serve Congress. He observed,

Upon my conversations at the Hill, I found that the Hill on average did not appreciate GAO work and found it not relevant. In most cases, GAO work was considered irrelevant in terms of subject matter and slow in terms of timing. About that time, only 8% of GAO work was Congressionally requested.

In order to improve the GAO’s usefulness to Congress, one of the primary areas that Elmer Staats focused on was the audit report. In a memorandum to his staff dated February 24, 1970, Mr. Staats stressed the need to improve the language of audit reports. In that memorandum he said:

The language in many GAO reports continues to be of concern to me. In general, the reports are reasonably clear, if carefully read, and the information presented is usually convincing. However, the quality of the language used in many instances could be substantially improved. Too often, language is repeated unnecessarily, and the language is stilted, unnecessarily complicated, ponderous and sometimes even a bit pompous.

In seeking to establish an action agenda, Elmer Staats thought it necessary to begin this task by tracing GAO’s mission back to its legislative history from the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, both in terms of its stated and apparent intent. His interpretation led him to believe that the GAO’s role in government accountability was to conduct financial compliance, efficiency/economy and program results audits all of which were subsequently articulated in Government Auditing Standards [e.g., GAO 1972; 1981; 1988].

By establishing this, the GAO was able to extend its range of audit activities from the voucher audits of old to economy/ efficiency and program results audits. This new jurisdictional domain, in turn, allowed the GAO to develop standards of audit conduct to cover the new types of audits. In addition, the GAO also specified standards for their audit reports as guidance for their auditors. It specified that the contents of the audit reports should have sections on objectives, scope and methodology, audit findings and conclusions, and the causes of agency problems and recommendations for improvement.

As mentioned above, the extension and articulation of audit report requirements in the yellow book allowed Mr. Staats to then establish a basis for audit report review. Importantly, he felt that the audit report was an “institutional product,” not one to be attributed to any one individual or audit team, but to the organization as a whole. To increase the quality of these reports, among other things, Mr. Staats worked with a panel of consultants from different backgrounds allowing him to utilize a diverse range of expertise. Out of this consultation, Mr. Staats instituted a form of centralized report review so that “an institu tional consistency in the report was achieved to some extent”. This centralized report review function was to be housed in an administrative component [Freidson, 1986] of the GAO, known as the Office of Policy (OP). To Mr. Staats, this report review function was a way of ensuring report quality in terms of its technical characteristics. In a memorandum issued in 1979, he said,

Procedural controls are available to help ensure the quality of the final report. These controls include the independent verification of the facts, findings, conclusions and recommendations contained in the report; careful review by those responsible for the report; and advanced review by program administrators and other officials responsible for the program being evaluated . . . the independent verification of all the facts contained in the report is an important quality control procedure.
Consistent with this view, Mr. Staats observed when interviewed, “The only way the GAO can survive is through its credibility, nonpartisanship, and professional competence.

The Bowsher Years

Staats’s successor, Charles Bowsher, shared many of the concerns that Elmer Staats’s expressed and built on Staats’s progress in adding quality to GAO reports. In this regard, Bowsher set up a Reports Task Force (RTF) in the early part of his tenure to address the issue of audit report quality. This task force was headed by Ira Goldstein, who is now with Arthur Andersen in Washington, D.C., Charles Bowsher’s former organizational affiliation. In order to get a feel for the motivation that led to the Reports Task Force (RTF), an extensive interview was conducted with its former chairman, Ira Goldstein.

Goldstein recounted that while Bowsher was at Arthur Andersen, he used GAO reports and therefore had some prior impressions concerning their quality, believing that GAO reports were “not very professional.” The Reports Task Force emerged as a consequence of a meeting where Charles Bowsher shared his concerns about GAO report quality. The RTF activity was held in two phases: a preliminary scoping phase of about three weeks and a second more detailed phase of about six months. During the second phase, a core of senior GAO managers including Mr.

GAO reports and tried to develop standards for report quality by rating the reports. It was thought at the time that the concept of quality was largely “cultural” and “dependent on the individual reading the report”.

Based upon the collective experiences of this task force, and on receiving extensive feedback from Congress, the RTF came up with a list of ten items that would comprise report quality. These items included usefulness, timeliness, accuracy, completeness, constructiveness, convincingness, objectivity, clarity, simplicity, and conciseness. The RTF also recommended that the focus on quality be built into the front end of the job rather than during the report review stage. At that point, there was less disagreement on the components of quality but more on whether the individual reports that had been examined by the Task Force met those standards.

To help in disseminating this message of quality to the rest of the organization, a centralized office called the Office of Quality Assurance (OQA) was established. The OQA became the new centralized report review office, taking over the function from the Office of Policy in 1983. It was judged that the OQA could function as a place where GAO employees could be trained in the concept of report quality and where auditor would be given greater interaction with report reviewers, thereby developing a “collective consciousness” in a Durkheimian sense [Aron, 1967, p. 15]. The purpose behind developing a common consciousness of a quality report was to allow the GAO to move in the direction desired by Charles Bowsher. As a result of this endeavor, Mr. Goldstein observed that “over a period of time, the senior members of the GAO began to get a sense for what Mr. Bowsher’s philosophy of quality meant.” The OQA also tried to instill this in a more widespread manner by holding presentations and training sessions for GAO employees.

Eventually, the division heads thought that, given sufficient resources, they could handle the responsibility of report review at the divisional level. The OQA continued to spread the message of quality by training report reviewers for divisions, experimenting first with the Resources, Community and Economics Division (RCED), and then with other divisions. It was then up to the division heads to disseminate the message of report quality to their subordinates, such as Issue Area directors, and for them to extend the message downwardly. Once it was felt that progress had been made, the OQA was disbanded in 1986.

Report Timeliness

The GAO, however, has not been without its critics. In 1985, the Brooks Committee, chaired by Congressman Jack Brooks of the Government Oversight Committee, criticized the GAO for lack of timeliness in processing its reports. The Committee report indicated that its members thought the GAO took an inordinately long time to process its reports through report review once the fieldwork was completed.

The issue of timeliness has existed since the early 1970s and the problem was recognized as such by Elmer Staats. He attempted to rectify the situation and improve the processing of reports [memoranda dated March 29, 1972; and May 1974] by keeping track of delayed reports on a monthly basis in order to expedite their publication. On this point, a Congressional staffer who participated in the study observed that “Congress needs information quickly to make decisions. The review process is necessary, but is probably an overkill. They could kill half the levels on review and still not lose too much.” Staats went on to point out that, in his opinion, “the GrAO was an ivory tower, a thinktank that needed its time to function.” At the same time, he acknowledged the efforts of Charles Bowsher in attempting to correct the situation.

In support of the staffer’s assertion, Bowsher issued a memorandum dated September 6, 1985, titled “Improving GAO’s Responsiveness to Congressional Requests.” In this document, Mr. Bowsher indicated that feedback from Congress continued to criticize the timeliness or the lack of it on GAO’s part in meeting deadlines and issuing audit reports. In order to facilitate improvement, Bowsher suggested a greater involvement on the part of Congressional staff at targeting specific areas of audit of more use to them where time might be of the essence. He observed that:

Over the last few years, we have undertaken several efforts to improve our capacity to address the needs of the committees and the members of Congress. We have improved report quality, refocused on issue area plans, and reorganized the GAO to better accomplish its mission.

We recently launched a program taking a comprehensive look at how we do our work. The Assistant Comptroller General for Operations and a steering committee of senior GAO members have developed an approach that will involve everyone in further improving GAO operations, primarily regarding timeliness and overall efficiency of our work.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

In the early years of the GAO’s existence, Comptroller General Raymond McCarl focused the GAO’s activities on enforcing agency compliance with the letter of the law. As a result, under his tenure, the Division of Law was born which is now known as the Office of General Counsel (OGC). At the same time, his lack of onsite auditing resulted in work backlogs with lack of attention from Congress. Comptroller General Warren inherited the GAO at a time when government was getting much larger. He professionalized the GAO as an audit agency by conducting onsite audits, instituting a comprehensive audit program and setting up various regional offices all over the country and even abroad. Comptroller General Campbell continued to professionalize by recruiting heavily from colleges and universities. However, his policy of aloofness alienated the GAO from the agencies and Congress partially resulting in the Holifield Hearings in 1966 and thereby damaging relations with both constituents.

Comptroller General Staats improved relations by expanding the scope of GAO audits to concentrate the Agency’s efforts on performance audits and service to Congress. Comptroller General Bowsher continued on Staats’ path by focusing on the Congressional customer and attempting to increase GAO resources.

In the area of audit reporting, the roles of Elmer Staats and Charles Bowsher have been extremely important. Staats’ proactive approach in focusing on the Congressional customer allowed him to define government accountability, broaden the audit scope of GAO audits and thereby generate audit reports spanning a wide range of government issues. This meant, among other things, focusing on the language of the audit report in an effort to improve its comprehensibility. Guidelines for audit reporting were articulated in the GAO ‘Yellow Book’ and enforced by report reviewers in a centralized report review wing of the GAO. This allowed the GAO to work towards standardization of the audit report in a manner consistent with Elmer Staats’ initiative.

Charles Bowsher also realized that the GAO audit report was extremely important and formed a Reports Task Force

(RTF) to help study the quality of GAO reports. After centralizing the audit report review process in a unit known as the Office of Quality Assurance (OQA), the process was then decentralized to operating divisions. In fact, the audit reporting process as it is today, is a result of the directives of both Elmer Staats and Charles Bowsher.
Past research in accounting and auditing has focused its attention on the effect of leadership on the accomplishment of specific tasks and the effect on team performance. In contrast, the study of leadership on organizational activities and structure has been underresearched. This paper demonstrates how organizational leaders’ perceptions and reactions to the organizational environment impacts the longterm operations and structure of an organization.

A federal audit agency like the GAO operates in an environment where the demands of multiple constituents have to be satisfied in order to assure longterm survival and legitimacy [Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; 1990]. As the high profile leader of such an organization, the Comptroller General has to be able to set the tone for quality audit work at the GAO, assure Congress that it is meeting its audit oversight needs and demonstrate nonpartisanship and objectivity in the conduct of its audit engagements. The initiatives of the organizational leader have not only shortterm, but also longterm implications in their effect on accounting and audit activities, a point that is often overlooked in accounting research.

An important audit organization like the GAO has a great deal of impact on legislation and public perceptions through its audit reporting and other related activities. Future research involving the GAO could focus on the historical relationship of the GAO and various audited agencies over the years. The role of leadership in these relationships could be studied to provide insight into the influence that various Comptrollers General have had in its development. Further research in the audit reporting area could examine the ways in which GAO reports are used by Congressional members to satisfy their own political agendas and how it may impact the funding of federal programs.

This paper has attempted to address some research gaps by examining the historical role of past GAO Comptroller Generals in general and the audit report review process in particular. It is hoped that this paper would prompt accounting researchers to

examine the extremely important role of organizational leaders in their study of accounting issues.

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