The Commission secures the audit of 32 councils and 44 joint boards and committees (including police and fire and rescue services). Audit Scotland is a statutory body set up in April 2000 under the Public Finance and Accountability (Scotland) Act 2000. It provides services to the Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission. Together they ensure that the Scottish Government and public sector bodies in Scotland are held to account for the proper, efficient and effective use of public funds.

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Performance measurement is an integral part of the New Zealand model of public management, as it is for many other modern systems of governmental administration. This article examines data on performance indicators for the policy advice function in five government departments, for the years 1992 to 2005, to determine which types of indicators are used, and to gauge the extent to which they offer meaningful information about the quality of policy advice. As part of its managerialist drive in the early 1990s, the government developed conceptual material designed to improve policy advice and management in departments. In general, our findings indicate that these initiatives did not lead over time to the further development of genuinely meaningful measures of the quality of policy advice, and that the indicators that have been used meet narrow managerial rather than broader political needs.

This article examines how output classes and performance indicators have changed between 1992 and 2002 in five selected departments of the New Zealand Public Service. Process, output and largely artificial service quality performance measures have crowded out outcome, efficiency and effectiveness indicators, across the board. Both output classes and performance indicators have been highly labile, though the reasons for this remain speculative in the meantime. The New Zealand state sector is currently implementing a 'managing for outcomes' strategy, intended to overcome too strong a preoccupation with the production of outputs. However, because output classes remain the key feature of the Public Finance Act 1989 the means of ensuring and demonstrating policy effectiveness must be more broadly based than a reliance on the countability of organisational output classes and performance measures.

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