Contenu du sommaire : Rendre des comptes – Rendre compte

— Providing accounts, being accountable: ambiguous notions — To understand the meaning of the principle stated by article 15 of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, it is necessary to go back to the debates of 1789 and examine its articulation with the ministerial responsibility which has been progressively established together with the parliamentary regime. Since about thirty years, transparency and efficiency principles impose new constraints upon the public administration requested to be accountable. This raises the question as to what extend these managerial requirements influence the traditional system of responsibility.

— Accountability: What is it all about? Squaring the democratic circle — Accountability is based on old practices but is renewed by an explicit objective of performance. It has experienced remarkable progress as to the contents of information provided and as to the way it is presented. It fully contributes to the rationalization of governing' methods. But the use made of the information delivered remains modest. This is due to the fact that the groups in charge of the decision making, politicians and experts, coordinates poorly and don't exploit their respective capacities in order to pass the reforms considered as necessary.

— The debate about the public and para-public bodies set up in the 1950s — Being accountable is both providing accounts and being liable of the use of the public funds granted. In the 1950s, the massive and sudden emergence of a large para-public sector raised the accountability' issue of the new bodies created. These bodies, created also for the fulfillment of commercial purposes, sought to elude public accountings rules and the legal controls attached to it. In this perspective, being accountable was reduced to provide accounts. Gilbert Devaux, head of the Public Accounts department of the Finances ministry from 1949 to 1956, attempted to counter this centrifugal move. He decisively contributed to the drafting of a body of legislation aimed at mitigating the risks of public financial commitments towards the newly established para-public sector. Doing so, he reiterated the primacy of the legal constraints attached to the public accounting system on an accountably based on the provision of quantified results.

— On what does the State provide account in its annual performance reports ? — This article focuses on the performance accountability implemented by the LOLF since 2006 and appended to the draft budget bill as well as to budget review bill. The authors propose a grid to characterize the types of performance accountability and to assess the potential improvements and the foreseeable difficulties in moving from one type of accountability to another. Authors show that the performance for which it is accounted is designed according to an organizational logic, is imbued with ambiguity and is far from being a first step towards the evaluation of public policies.

— State's public accounting and financial accountability — The starting point of the article is the postulate according to which the financial information related to a given body is permanently adapted to its situation. Then it presents the three accountings which are parts of the State's public financial information system: budgetary accounting, general accounting and national accounts. Among these three, the general accounting may be considered as the ideal tool for financial rendition and for the readability of public action: it is more precise and more comprehensive and it allows to report about any kind of economic activity (market or non-market). However, it has important limits. On the one hand, it has anyway to be adapted to the specificities of the State's and of the other public bodies' it applies. On the other hand, it is a highly technical tool, underused by most of its recipients and facing the competition of other financial information systems.

— Providing accounts to be accountable. The evolution of Italian local governments accountings — During the 1970 decade, Italian local governments and regions were granted competencies related to the implementation of welfare policies. As a consequence, their budgets increased dramatically. Concurrently they realized that the accruals public accounting system they had to use didn't enabled them neither to make readable the policies they were in charge of, neither to be used as a management instrument. Accordingly, the public authorities elaborated a new public accounting system based on cash accounting with the aim not only to address the two shortcomings but also to be common to all the public bodies, as this was not the case before. The article stress that even if the implementation of the new system is increasing, several adjustments difficulties have still to be overcome.

— Financial Accountability and Managerial Accountability: separation, competition or complementarity? — The liability of public accountants is among the best known (and elaborate) instruments of financial accountability instruments. It is however implemented according to formal criteria without regards to managerial concerns. Other instruments take nevertheless managerial concerns more into consideration. For example, the practice of the financial jurisdictions lead to more developed control activities closer to managerial accountability, to such an extent that financial accountability seems to be in competition with managerial accountability. This evolution of the financial jurisdictions towards activities more focused on public auditing and public management, together with the evolution of the authorizing officers' liability and an implementation of the finances bills' framework (LOLF) more compliant with its initial purpose of increasing public managers' accountability, could lead to a financial accountability more complementary to the managerial accountability.

— French Public Hospitals and Accountabilities — Public hospitals have several principals. Each of them set them objectives. They have meanwhile to increase their productivity and revenues while contributing to restraint the spendings of the public body (assurance-maladie) in charge of their financing which constitutes its revenues. Besides, their supervisory bodies ask them to improve their efficacy and their efficiency; at the same time they are under close public scrutiny through the media. This article shows that to each objective set corresponds an ad hoc accountability relationship with the principal. But the multiplicity of relationships actually only reflects the complexity (and the possible contradictions) of the objectives.

— How to improve PPPs' accountability? — The requirement for accountability in public management is widely seen as a component of a managerial process based on the principal-agent model. As performance based contracts, PPPs seem at first glance in line with this framework, but the various expectations of the stakeholders make the accountability of these partnerships much more complex. We aim at demonstrating that this complexity must be taken into account in the public accountants' work. In this perspective, the British experience vindicates the usefulness of an audit process going beyond the budgetary risk detection.

— Reluctance to provide accounts: the case of Labour Inspectorate officers (1980-2013) — The Labour Inspectorate officers are requested to provide accounts about their control activities. However, they don't consider the collection and the transmission of the related data as a priority, but more like a “secondary obligation” in contrast with what they believe to be their “real job”. Moreover, they boycotted the use of a dedicated software introduced in the beginning of the years 2000. This became a way to oppose the recent reforms of the administration in charge of the implantation of labour policy.

— Executive Agencies and Accountability: the Case of the National Agency for Urban Renewal — In the framework of the urban policy, the National Agency for Urban Renewal is in charge of the implementation and follow-up of the renewal of low income neighborhoods. In this context, it manages financial intervention instruments, the National Programs for Urban Renewal, which amount several billions. This article highlights the accountability relationships in place around this management: towards the Agency and from the Agency. It shows how the resulting information is used to evaluate achievements and limits of the led policy. However, it underlines that this evaluation, which highlights three main problems, is not used to solve them and do not lead to a “learning evaluation”.

— The difficulty of the documents appended to the annual budget acts to provide a full account of the gender equality policy — This article examines how two kinds of annexes to the annual budget acts provide account of the implementation of the gender equality policy, projected as well as realized. The first are the “annual performance projects” and “annual performance assessments” reports concerning the gender equality ministerial policy, labelled “programme n° 137”. The second are the “cross-policy document” which outlines the gender equality interministerial policy as it results from the contribution of “programme n° 137” but also of all the other programmes contributing to this policy even if they have different primary objectives. If the first annexes are still perfectible, especially as how they provide account of the ministerial policy performance, the second contain serious flaws, like their incapacity to identify the credits allocated to the “cross-policy”.

— Public development Aid and Accountability. The case of the EU budget support to Senegal (2009-2011) — Budget support with performance-based variable tranches is a key instrument of the EU external aid reform. Its aim is to improve aid ownership by government's beneficiaries. The implementation of this aid is delegated to national management instruments. It is accompanied by formal systems of performance's objectives, which achievement is a condition for the disbursement of the successive tranches. The case illustrates the complexity of this new form of aid and of the accountability it implies.

— Accountability of the EU agencies related to the Area of freedom security and justice — This article examines how the European agencies related to the Area of freedom security and justice are held accountable of their activities. It shows first that they are accountable on three issues: their finances, the public policy they are in charge of the and technical issues at stake. It underlines that they moved from an intergovernmental accountability, mainly oriented towards the Council and the member States to a community method accountability, mainly headed towards more supranational institutions of the EU, especially towards the European parliament.

— The relationships between evaluation and accountability of public policies — This articles studies how public policy evaluation can serve the democratic principles that are providing accounts and being accountable. It proposes a typology of the different modes of public policy evaluation based on three paradigms: strategic or “evidence-based” evaluation, collaborative/pluralist or “by deliberation” evaluation and managerial or “by management standards” evaluation. It shows that these three approaches do not have the same capacity to facilitate the provision of accounts and the same attitude towards the accountability. Focusing on the first of its first two functions, which are providing accounts, it explains that political factors are at the origins of the current predominance in France of collaborative/pluralist evaluations paradigm even if it is the least able to fulfil this function. Paradoxically, managerial evaluation, potentially able to facilitate the provision of accounts, especially by relying on the LOLF framework, is little used, both by the executive and by the control institutions of the executive's action, which are the Parliament and the Court of Auditors.

— Political Supervision of Independent Regulatory Authorities in Switzerland — After having described the particularity and the different forms of legal status, powers and financial resources of the Independent Regulatory Authorities in Switzerland, this article examines their dual level of responsibility towards political bodies: the Federal Council (Government of the Confederation), in particular with regard to the fulfilment of their strategic objectives; the Federal Assembly (parliament of the Confederation), which supervise them, indirectly, through the reports it receive from the Federal Council and, directly, especially by establishing parliamentary enquiry commissions. This dual system allows for some political control, in particular in situations in which decisions with high political importance have to be taken.

— The French Parliament and Accountability — Having finally gained the means to exercise greater control over the executive's action, the members of Parliament are now required to use them, in order to fully implement the principle of accountability. At the same time, they are also requested to respect this principle themselves. They now have to justify how they spend public money, managed the parliamentary' s budget they have at their disposal, respect the rules they have themselves enacted, and even have to justify their attendance to parliamentary work.

— Relationship dynamics in private public partnerships: the case of the Anglo-Saxon model — This article presents the Anglo-Saxon model of public-private partnership (PPP) contracts. It argues that the business model of a PPP is not a partnership one but, rather, constitutes a classic agency relationship that can be understood by analyzing power relations between actors. Four interrelated dynamics characterize this kind of relation: greater incompleteness in performance contracts; conflicting interests between builders and the operators; price and schedule rigidities stemming from the contractual model and, finally, the specific situation of the project company related to two principals (its funding partner and its public sponsor).