Posted March 23, 2000 Bean Counters and People Power By Jonathan Walters Earlier this month, a group of top state, local and federal auditors convened just outside of Washington to discuss the weighty matter of manpower (and womanpower) in government. The purpose of the meeting was to get auditors to at least start thinking about becoming more active players in assessing the human capital development and management practices of government and in pushing governments to think harder and more strategically about investing in people power. What became abundantly clear as the session unfolded, however, was that among the 50 or 60 auditors gathered at the forum, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for opening this new frontier. After all, it’s been a tussle just getting auditors to look beyond governments’ books and into the softer world of actual governmental performance through formal “performance audits,” on the one hand, and at the quality and value of government performance data, on the other. Clearly, though, some group has to begin taking greater responsibility for both critiquing government’s performance on the personnel front and for helping push the public sector toward more professional practices when it comes to building HR capacity. Facing a wave of employee retirements in the next five to ten years, and with competition for quality people growing increasingly intense, government is going to have to crank it up a notch when it comes to staffing up. In a recently released paper, “Strategic Human Capital Management: The Critical Link in Government Performance,” U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker argues that that group should be auditors. In fact, it was Walker’s personal interest in the issue that led to the aforementioned forum. Ideally, though, auditors shouldn’t have to tread this turf, at least not as the point people on pushing good human resources management and investment practices in government. That job should fall to the personnel professionals who have been hired by government, presumably, to do that job. In a handful of states and localities, personnel officials understand that and are beginning to work much more as personnel consultants whose job it is to think strategically about long-range human resources issues, even as they help their customer agencies find, hire and keep good people. The problem is that state and local personnel officials have come to be viewed as the keepers of a complex set of personnel rules and not as your friendly neighborhood consultant ready and willing to help you find good help. Worse, many personnel officials have come to see themselves in the exact same light. The fundamental question at this point is whether personnel professionals can make the transition from gatekeeper to consultant on their own. If they can’t, then it may be that it will fall to the auditing community to begin pushing, whether they really want the job or not. Jonathan Walters is a Governing staff correspondent. Agree? Disagree? Want to expand on a point? E-mail us at mailbox@governing.com, and we'll post your comments here. Please include your name, location, government or business title or job description, and a daytime phone number (for verification purposes). Recently in View: Hacked Off: dealing with Internet invaders (posted March 20, 2000) Blame for a Fiasco: privatization and accountability (posted March 13, 2000) Attack of the Barnes-o-Meter: tracking enemies with technology (posted March 9, 2000) Lessons of an Older Suburb: paying the piper for keeping taxes low (posted March 6, 2000) Complete index Copyright © 2000, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.