Public sector auditor identities in making efficiency auditable

Description
This paper examines how the National Audit Office of Denmark (NAOD) manoeuvred in
making the Danish military receptive to a performance-accountability project in the period
1990–2007. Evidence is provided from a detailed case study, where the actions of the auditors
have been followed in their efforts to make the military activities auditable by focusing
on the multiple and dynamic interactions between them, the auditee and others. This study
contributes to our understanding of how auditors manoeuvre with their performance audit
devices in different ways to make efficiency auditable. It appears that as the auditee initiated
the implementation of a new accounting system called DeMars a stream of overflows
threatened to destabilise it. Groups within the auditee were eager to put heat into the overflowing.
This study illuminates how the auditors, equipped with their devices of purification
in the later stages of the project, helped at least provisionally to contain the overflows
and stabilize the construction.

Public sector auditor identities in making ef?ciency auditable:
The National Audit Of?ce of Denmark as independent auditor
and modernizer
Peter Skrbk
Copenhagen Business School, Department of Accounting and Auditing, Solbjerg Plads 3, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
a b s t r a c t
This paper examines how the National Audit Of?ce of Denmark (NAOD) manoeuvred in
making the Danish military receptive to a performance-accountability project in the period
1990–2007. Evidence is provided from a detailed case study, where the actions of the audi-
tors have been followed in their efforts to make the military activities auditable by focusing
on the multiple and dynamic interactions between them, the auditee and others. This study
contributes to our understanding of how auditors manoeuvre with their performance audit
devices in different ways to make ef?ciency auditable. It appears that as the auditee initi-
ated the implementation of a new accounting system called DeMars a stream of over?ows
threatened to destabilise it. Groups within the auditee were eager to put heat into the over-
?owing. This study illuminates how the auditors, equipped with their devices of puri?ca-
tion in the later stages of the project, helped at least provisionally to contain the over?ows
and stabilize the construction. Due to such different manoeuvres by the auditors, this paper
demonstrates the problems that emerge when state auditors manoeuvre in performance
auditing with identities both as ‘modernizers’, i.e., participating in providing the reasons
for change and de?ning its designs and as ‘independent auditors’, i.e., to legitimize the con-
struction in which they participated themselves. Many allies to the auditors worked hard
in protecting the NAOD as the two identities con?icted with each other during the execu-
tion of the project.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
In consequence of New Public Management (Hood,
1995) and the emergence of performance auditing as an
increasingly in?uential force in the public sector, numer-
ous Auditors’-General Of?ces have sought to ensure that
their activities are consistent with, and supportive of, pub-
lic sector reforms (Funnell, 2003; Gendron, Cooper, &
Townley, 2001, 2007; Guthrie & Parker, 1999; Power,
1997, 2003a). Thus, auditors came to realize that they need
to engage more closely with the auditee (Pollitt, 2003;
Power, 2003a). Such engagement has contributed to a drift
in the activities of public sector auditors increasingly
becoming involved with policy making, which is not with-
out its problems (Gendron et al., 2001). Later Gendron et al.
(2007) analysed the strategies of auditors to become recog-
nized as possessing expertise aligned to NPM and Funnell
(2003) described the conditional in?uence of audit from
a case where the NSW Auditor-General Of?ce was criti-
cised when engaging in performance auditing. Pollitt
(2003, p. 159) noted that there are great variations in the
degree to which performance auditors consult with audi-
tees and concluded that we need to know more about
how Audit Of?ces develop their roles.
Despite these signi?cant contributions little is still
known of accounting processes in action (Burchell, Clubb,
Hopwood, & Huges, 1980) and in particular of what kind
of manoeuvres auditors become engaged in when being
in action (Power, 2003a; Robson, Humphrey, Khalifa, &
Jones, 2007).
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2009.01.001
E-mail address: [email protected]
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
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This paper seeks to further contribute to our knowledge
on how performance auditors manoeuvre when being in
action. More speci?cally, it turns attention to how the
National Audit Of?ce of Denmark (NAOD; hereafter, the
‘‘Of?ce”) became involved in a speci?c project to make
public sector ef?ciency auditable in the Danish Defence
Forces (DDFs). It illuminates the actions and what it means
in terms of their identities when seeking to initiate and
stabilize, a performance-accountability project called
DeMars.
This research is based upon a detailed and processual
case study of an implementation that heavily involved
the Of?ce for more than 18 years and caused a lot of heated
debates also in the press. As such, this case offers excellent
opportunities to study how the Of?ce manoeuvres (i.e. act-
ing) with shifting and con?icting identities as ‘independent
auditor’ and ‘modernizer’. The ‘modernizer’ identity char-
acterizes the role of the Of?ce as one of change agents that
seeks to gain ground for change and to in?uence the de-
signs of the consequent accounting system. The ‘indepen-
dent auditor’ identity characterizes the role of the Of?ce
as one that manoeuvred to purify the system that it has it-
self participated to develop. This paper is concerned with
understanding how the Of?ce manoeuvred with these
identities in protracted and heated processes of making
the project at all feasible. To anchor performance audit
knowledge in the auditee’s accounting systems, it involves
processes to generate an actor-network of innovation:
These moments constitute the different phases of a gen-
eral process called translation, during which the iden-
tity of actors, the possibility of interaction and the
margins of manoeuvre are negotiated and delimited
(Callon, 1986, p. 203).
Innovation involves the construction of a network of
entities that are enrolled to support the innovation in var-
ious ways. During such processes the entities – such as the
auditors – and their margins of manoeuvre and identities
are also negotiated and delimited. The auditors become a
part of translations, where network partners such as the
auditee, the parliament and other government units partic-
ipate in negotiating and delimiting their identity. Thus, it is
demonstrated in this case that the collective efforts of
making things auditable involves negotiations of the audi-
tors’ identities and their manoeuvres as to what they can
do, and what they cannot do. This is seen in relation to
three themes; ‘making new things auditable’, ‘the identi-
ties of auditors’ and ‘auditor reports as devices of
puri?cation’.
The ?ndings of this paper are signi?cant for a number of
reasons. Firstly, it contributes to the growing literature on
how Audit Of?ces in various countries engage in perfor-
mance auditing or other NPM reforms. It does so by provid-
ing a detailed and processual case study of how the
auditors participated in the production of making a speci?c
accounting innovation at all feasible. Secondly, it provides
insights into the manoeuvres of auditors to anchor their
knowledge base (i.e. costing principles) in the auditee’s
accounting systems. Thirdly, it develops knowledge about
how the identities of the Of?ce, the auditee and others
are interrelated with one another during programme exe-
cution, especially paying attention to the obstacles and
over?owing of the execution. Finally, it contributes by pro-
viding insights into how performance audit reports are
developed to facilitate different purposes during the
execution.
This paper is organized as follows. Section two next dis-
cusses the literature on performance auditing and making
the public sector auditable and presents actor-network
theory for the study of auditors’ manoeuvrability. Before
starting up the analysis, the case based method is outlined.
The following section describes the organizational and his-
torical context of the DDF and ends up outlining the major
events of the DeMars project. Then, in four subsections, the
story of how the DDF’s military activities were made audit-
able is told with a speci?c emphasis on the auditors’
manoeuvring in the network. Finally, the ?ndings of the
analysis are summarised and related to extant debates in
the literature and implications for future research are
discussed.
Accounting innovations, auditor manoeuvrability
and identity
In much of the extant literature, auditors have been
portrayed to manoeuvre usually in the role as ‘independent
auditor’. However, as Power (1996) suggests in his seminal
article, ‘Making Things Auditable’, audit is an activity
involving two main types of processes: the negotiation of
a legitimate and institutionally acceptable knowledge base
and the creation of ‘environments being receptive to this
knowledge base’ (p. 289). These statements draw attention
to the case that auditability is an achievement that presup-
poses actions. As Power (2003a) later phrases in a general-
ised sense ‘auditability must be constructed as a series of
acceptable and legitimate techniques’. However, when
characterizing the process of making things auditable as
one of ‘fact building’ he mainly characterizes the auditing
process as one where auditors apply various (mainly statis-
tical) methods to verify the data of various disclosures.
Similarly, when it comes to the matter of anchoring, the
audit knowledge base in a speci?c performance measure-
ment system and the question of who does the work it
has more to do with accountants and consultants, rather
than explicitly with auditors. As it appears, auditors are
portrayed primarily as going into action when the mea-
surement systems are installed and ready to provide data
for the auditing process.
Heated debates about auditor independence have
accompanied NPM reforms. Traditionally, state auditors
have been known as manoeuvring with the identity as
‘independent auditors’ but due to NPM in several countries
they have developed facilitation of ‘economic, ef?cient and
effective’ public administration in efforts to increase inter-
nal and external accountability. For Audit Of?ces to con-
duct performance auditing with the aim of transforming
the public sector towards external and internal account-
ability, it is useful to create a knowledge base in the mate-
rialised form of White Papers, reports, memos, etc. that can
be circulated to the auditee. Such documents are closely
related to policy making, which in the public sector is com-
972 P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987
monly understood as being organized by Treasuries or
Ministries of Finance. And when being put in circulation
to greater sets of audiences, documents may under certain
conditions participate in creating ‘environments receptive
to audit’. But what speci?cally are these conditions? What
activities are needed to advance and technically anchor
such knowledge bases within accounting systems and
other organizational arrangements with the auditee? And
of particular interest to this paper, how do they involve
auditors?
Gendron et al. (2001, p. 288) conducted research pri-
marily on how a performance audit knowledge base was
legitimized and found that the audit of?ce, as it moved clo-
ser to NPM, used its annual report as a medium to socially
construct (widening) auditor independence boundaries by
invoking ‘‘discourses and narratives to affect audiences’
perceptions and behaviors”. Their ?ndings suggest that
Audit Of?ces can move the boundaries regarding indepen-
dence and the activities in which state auditors can engage.
In response to such debates, Power (2003b, p. 199)
points out ‘‘It should be recognized that a certain degree
of auditor dependence on the auditee is desirable and nec-
essary”. More recently, in a related approach Gendron et al.
(2007) have focused on developments in auditors’ exper-
tise in their efforts to expand their body of expertise to
new jurisdictions. They found that state auditors were
developing ‘expertise’ to guide and implement NPM re-
forms, among other things, such as the installation of per-
formance measurement systems. Such contributions
inform us that auditing is subject to change and auditors
are involved with efforts to expand and stabilize audit
knowledge bases, methodologies and technologies with
auditees. Further, we note that audit is in?uenced by the
environments in which it operates and that it constructs
those environments while interacting with the auditee
and others. However, to ensure the development of soft
practices, such as making public sector ‘ef?ciency’ audit-
able, into hard and objective practices is a costly and time
consuming endeavour. Such attempts may even be resisted
and remain controversial (Power, 1996, 1997).
A more recent strand of auditing research takes up
Power’s idea of how the audit process and changes in the
knowledge base and expertise in?uence the identity of
the auditors. Robson et al. (2007) show – in the private sec-
tor – how some auditors became involved in expanding
their knowledge into new areas of business risk auditing
emphasising their efforts to mobilise an associated knowl-
edge base and how it renegotiated the auditors’ profes-
sional identity into one of ‘business advisers’. Being
inspired by such an approach I now set out to develop
the framework from which to describe and characterize
how the Of?ce’s identities are negotiated and delimited
during its participation in the performance-accountability
project in the DDF.
Actor-network theory and the theorising of auditor
manoeuvrability and identity
Actor network theory offers a possibility to study
accounting innovations due to its emphasis on various
technological innovations and how they are made feasible.
In my descriptions, I draw upon the notions of manoeuvra-
bility and identity that are integral to the moments of
translation and the notions of framing and over?owing.
In organizing the case account, I draw upon Callon’s four
moments of translation: ‘‘problematization”, ‘‘interesse-
ment”, ‘‘enrolment” and ‘‘mobilisation” (Callon, 1986). Fol-
lowing Callon’s problematization, it describes a system of
alliances, or associations, between entities, for instance,
being organizations or social groups, such as professions,
thereby de?ning their roles to play, i.e. their identities
and what they ‘want’ (Callon, 1986, p. 206) in the develop-
ment of the network. In the moments of ‘‘interessement”
the instigating actors attempt to impose and stabilise the
role and identity of the other actors. To achieve interesse-
ment ‘‘various devices are used to implement such actions”
(Callon, 1986, p. 208). Callon de?nes the moment of
‘‘enrolment” to be, ‘‘about multilateral negotiations, trials
of strength and tricks that accompany the interessements
and enable them to succeed” (Callon, 1986, p. 211). Brie?y,
this moment is about how easily the identi?ed actors let
themselves enrol. Problems of enrolment add considerably
to the dynamics of the network interactions by initiating
further work on interessement devices to smooth enrol-
ment. The last moment ‘‘mobilisation” is a matter of,
‘‘who speaks in the name of whom” (Callon, 1986, p.
214) and how the enrolled entities can transform them-
selves into active support or betray the construction as dis-
sidents. In Callon’s distinction between entities and
spokespersons lie the possibilities to conceive of organiza-
tions or larger social groups, such as professions, as entities
in the name of which a few spokespersons act. To speak in
the name of others is typically achieved through a series of
displacements involving the work of experts like that of
auditors.
In the auditing literature developed from Pentland
(1993) and anthropology,
1
Power (2003a, p. 385) points
out, primarily having ?nancial auditing in mind that ‘‘audit
is a process of puri?cation culminating mainly in the ‘clean’
audit opinion for outside consumption”. Strathern (2006)
has similarly raised attention to the case that audit may con-
tribute to the smooth running of organizations by its power
to purify the principles of organisations. This may also in-
clude accounting technologies anchored with the auditee.
To develop this idea, and going back to Latour (1993, pp.
10–13), it is argued that puri?cation is not separated from
the processes of translation, rather it should be seen in the
context of the hybrid networks of humans and non-humans
‘‘. . ., since puri?cation is considered a useful work requiring
instruments, institutions and know how. . .” (Latour, 1993,
p. 78). Puri?cation is an active process where someone
establishes a zone, in which things get de-politicised by
claiming independency and expertise, like that of an audit
of?ce. Callon (1991, p. 134) points out that texts, such as
1
For a long time, puri?cation has been a theme in several areas of
research. In anthropology (Dougherty, 1998; Douglas, 1966), it is demon-
strated that puri?cation is a process of establishing distinctions between
state of affairs where those distinctions centre on being either pure or
impure. In sociology, Foucault (1990) describes and criticizes the case that
sciences such as medicine implied puri?cation by the codi?cation of sexual
behaviors and what is permitted and what is forbidden.
P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987 973
(auditor) reports, are intermediaries which he de?nes as
‘‘anything passing between actors which de?nes the rela-
tionship between them”. In moments of intermediaries
being put in circulation among actors they come to (ac-
tively) de?ne, explore, stabilise, and test their identities
against one another. In contrast to the extant audit literature
with its focus on ?nancial auditing, in this paper I follow
how performance auditors perform the work of puri?cation
to accounting innovations by erasing the mess of practice.
An integral feature of these four moments of translation
is the concept of identity. It relates to the network of inter-
actions in which actors get involved. Callon’s notion of
identity, therefore, becomes a relational one. It becomes a
matter of studying both how socio-technical programmes
can be seen as attempts to de?ne group identities and then
how the individuals, with their self-concepts as Empson
(2004) would say, become recon?gured
In short, the actor’s ontology is variable: his or her
objectives, interests, will and thus identity are caught
up in a process of continual recon?guration, a process
that is intimately related to the constant recon?gura-
tion of the network of interactions in which he or she
is involved (Callon, 1998b, p. 253).
The concept of identity illuminates the question of
‘what it is you want’, ‘how we should act’, and how this
is in?uenced when being in interaction in socio-technical
networks. Identity recon?gurations, as also Hübner
(2007) reminds us, are taking place signi?cantly in infor-
mal interactions – therefore more dif?cult to analyse –
than the publicly communicated impressions. Identity
recon?guration is a negotiation. Negotiations take place
when individuals are engaged in interactions performing
with a certain identity. When individuals or organizations
perform with a certain identity they do that in front of an
audience. Depending on the responses of the audience, the
identity of the performer is left open, for instance, for ap-
plause, scepticism or direct critique or whatever kind of
feedback.
The strength of actor-network theory is that physical de-
vices are seen to participate in the interactions and identity
recon?gurations. But the devices and the way they perform
to users as audiences may also be of relevance to the inter-
actions under study as is also pointed out by Czarniawska
(2000). When entering into such negotiations it helps us
to explain what it is that is at stake as interactions generate
con?icts and become hot as well as explaining what actions
are initiated to achieve identity aspirations. Identity is fun-
damental to the way individuals make sense out of their
lives, howthey want to live it and howthey deal with obsta-
cles that confront their aspirations. The argument is that the
recon?guration of identities relates to various (technologi-
cal) innovations being initiated in actor-networks between
and within organizations. When Empson (2004, p. 763)
mentions ‘‘that managers are organizational members in
their own right, their organizational aspirations will be
bounded by the existing organizational identity”, this can
be developed by pointing to the case that social groups,
such as auditors, and their identities are negotiated and
delimited by the dynamic interactions of the socio-techni-
cal networks of which they become part. Robson, Khalifa,
Humphrey and Jones (2007) in their constructivist study
share the same interest when being concerned with how
the expansion and negotiation of audit expertise that re-
lates to new audit technologies in?uence the auditor’s pro-
fessional identity, or more generally the identity of
accountants (Ahrens & Chapman, 2000). The more active
and dynamic use of the concept of identity and how physi-
cal devices participate can provide actor-network-based re-
search in accounting and auditing with valuable insights on
howtechnologies and social groups’ identities are recon?g-
ured in the mutual sets of interactions.
In Callon’s (1998b) work on the notions of framing and
over?owing, he further develops the possibility to theorise
how various accounting and audit technologies participate
in the framing of group and individual lives. The point is
that accounting and audit technologies together with fur-
ther devices play a role in establishing the ‘cognitive
boundaries’ that de?ne and delimit the sets of possibilities
for interaction ‘‘The frame establishes a boundary within
which interactions – the signi?cance and content of which
are self-evident to the protagonists - take place more or
less independently of their surrounding context” (Callon,
1998b, p. 249).
The cognitive boundaries for the employees of the au-
dited organization may change in various ways when audi-
tors and others, initiate changes in accounting and auditing
technologies. When employees such as civil servants are
asked to report on certain issues as part of new audit pro-
cesses they are being mediated upon by various technolo-
gies and so in?uences are exerted on their work life and
their occupational identity.
However, to ‘make things auditable’ through construct-
ing accounting innovations also involves sets of other de-
vices. The whole framing cannot succeed without
substantial investments in devices such as white papers,
guidelines, laws, auditor reports and statutes. Recalling
the four moments of translation, framing is the result of
the outcome of the interactions relating to each of the four
moments.
Behind the need for the work of puri?cation are the pos-
sible problems of enrolment that may be due to ‘unin-
tended consequences’. This term has been widely used
within the accounting and audit literature (see, for in-
stance, Power, 1996, 2003a; Sikka, Puxty, Willmott, & Coo-
per, 1998). As Giddens (1984, p. 11) says ‘‘philosophers
have used up a great deal of ink attempting to analyse
the nature of intentional activity”. The word ‘intention’
also raises a philosophical debate on what is intentional
and what is not. Instead Callon suggests the term ‘over-
?ow’, which is his sociological revision of the economists’
concept of externality. Over?ows bear similarities with
the term ‘obstacles’ in Callon’s work on translation. The
concept of over?owing refers not just to the positive or
negative externalities – terms coming close to ‘unintended
consequences’ – produced during the framing attempts,
but also to the additional political actions that may be gen-
erated by re?exive agencies concerned with the externali-
ties produced. Agencies that develop feelings of being
excluded and not listened to may add to the dynamics
and complexities by problematizing the constructions. In
this way the perspective opens for the possibility of agents
974 P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987
being transformed from passive objects to active subjects
that may try to counteract the constructions in (for them)
intended ways.
A variety of over?ows are produced when calculative
agents are trying to make things auditable. Instead of
describing imperfections as ‘accidental’ like economists
do, Callon sees an over?ow as a phenomenon that is not
unexpected, but rather the norm and unavoidable. To
phrase it differently, framing is the production of order
while over?ows are the production of disorder, and both
are produced simultaneously. But it is not enough to iden-
tify them, it is also necessary to identify who is responsible
for them and who is affected by them (Callon, 1998b, p.
257). Over?ows are something that calculative agencies at-
tempt to contain as they otherwise will threaten the fram-
ing attempts. Callon’s framing and over?owing concepts
supplement his work on translation and in particular allow
for a richer examination of the sort of disorder produced
simultaneously with the attempted production of innovat-
ing a new order. In contrast to the concept of ‘unintended
consequences’, over?ows and re?exive agencies are at the
very centre of analysis and not just a residual or ‘by-prod-
uct’ as Strathern (2002) puts it. The concept of over?ows
adds to the complexity and dynamics of achieving order
and allows for a richer description of how innovations
are made feasible.
In operationalising actor-network theory for this study,
the four moments of translation constitute the core of the
framework to examine the ways in which the perfor-
mance-accountability project is made feasible and how
the Of?ce manoeuvres during the execution of the project.
However, the four moments should not be seen as re?ect-
ing calendar time since in reality they can overlap (Callon,
1986). Thus even though mobilisation is the last moment
in Callon’s analytical structure, mobilisation and the inci-
dence of possible betrayal may in real time occur at differ-
ent points in the life of the accounting innovation under
study, suggesting that the four moments are not ?xed
chronologically. The twin notions of framing and over?ow-
ing are closely interrelated and also overlapping with the
four moments of translation. Both notions relate in differ-
ent ways to the four moments. The notion of framing can
be seen to relate to all the four moments since it is the mo-
ments in total that determine the outcome of the network
interactions and thereby the framing that is achieved. The
notion of over?owing relates mainly to the problems of
attaining enrolment, and the work of puri?cation to secure
mobilisation of the spokespersons of the accounting inno-
vation. In summary, the description is guided by the ques-
tions how did the auditors manoeuvre to make the
performance-accountability project at all feasible; and,
how was the Of?ce successful in these efforts?
Method
Being inspired by actor-network theory and the anthro-
pology of science and technology (Callon, 1998a) I draw on
a detailed and longitudinal case study. The origin of the
?eldwork dates back to 1996 when I was as an associate
professor in accounting at Copenhagen Business School in-
vited together with an academic colleague to teach of?cers
at the Royal Danish Defence College in accounting. After
some time, I realized that the Of?ce had launched a num-
ber of audit reports on the DDF’s accounting systems. As
a teacher, I was asked to provide case examples related to
DDF activities, but there were no such cases in Denmark.
However, I had been given some performance audit reports
on the DDF, which I used for teaching purposes from 1997
to 1999. As a result, I became interested in the Of?ce’s cri-
tique of the DDF and its accounting systems. They criticised
the DDF for being unable to provide cost calculations with-
out using ‘arbitrary’ cost allocations (Rigsrevisionen, 1996).
Cost allocations are by nature arbitrary and the critique
stimulated my interest in ‘‘what is going on here”. In
November 1997, an of?cer closely related to the proposal
to initiate a performance-accountability project gave a
speech at the Defence College. Fromthis speech it appeared
that some DDF of?cers believed it would be feasible to de-
velop a comprehensive cost allocation system without
arbitrary cost allocations. The speech caused a heated de-
bate among the of?cers. In this way, I was present in ‘real
time’ before, during and after it was decided by the Parlia-
ment to start the performance-accountability project. Hav-
ing established many relationships with the of?cers
through my 4 years of teaching at the Defence College, I
was able to follow many of the discussions including the
debate in the newspapers within the DDF. Over the years,
I have also collected many articles from DDF’s own work-
place letters and periodicals to illuminate attempts to ex-
plain to the employees the rationale of the project.
Consistently with actor-network theory I substantially
base my extensive ?eldwork on a lot of texts (Callon,
1991), among these, the paperwork produced by the Of?ce,
the DDF, the MoF and the press. These texts include White
Papers by the MoF, other White Papers by the DDF, audit
reports, audit notes by the Of?ce and correspondence be-
tween the DDF and the Of?ce. I was granted access to the
archive of the Ministry of Defence (MoD), where these
source documents are stored. In addition, I use various
laws (the Danish constitution, the Danish National Audit
Of?ce Act, the PAC Act) that were mobilised in discussion
at various moments.
In the beginning of my study I was troubled by the Of-
?ce’s reports since they were dif?cult to understand. They
seemed to contain truths beyond question and the writing
style seemed very bureaucratic (Radcliffe, 1999) with a le-
vel of pathos that can be characterized as extremely low
(Justesen & Skrbk, 2005). However, to begin theorising
the 15 audit reports and notes as the devices of problema-
tization, interessement, enrolment and mobilisation it ap-
peared that their designs were different and they served
different purposes and interests.
To supplement the observations and texts, from 2002 to
2006, I conducted 17 semi-structured interviews, each last-
ing approximately two hours. In all cases, there was an ano-
nymity agreement. Ten interviews were transcribed
including the interviews with a representative from the Of-
?ce, the instigating of?cers at the DDF, other of?cers, the
chairman of the PAC, two consultants, one representative
from the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and a journalist. Six
interviews were not taped but reported. In addition, I have
P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987 975
used ?eld notes from informal conversations with of?cers
and others. All of these different empirical sources have, in
the data analysis, been used to reconstruct the chain of
events relating to the accounting innovationand the auditor
manoeuvrability. The main purposes of the interviews were
tosort out the ?owof events andactions, as well as tounder-
stand the roles of the actors, their interests and what kind of
problems they could identify in relation to the project. The
multiple empirical sources have been used to cross-validate
the major events and what actually happened.
The organizational and historical context of making
the DDF receptive to the accountability project
The Of?ce is placed under the parliament and refers to
the PAC. Some well-known Danish politicians, ministers
and prime ministers have been the members of the PAC
at one point in their political careers. The Of?ce conducts
the practical audit work. Since 1976, the Auditor-General
of Denmark manages the Of?ce. During the 1990s the main
focus changed to conducting reviews of management
accounting systems as the second order auditing within
ministries and government agencies. This development ap-
pears to be parallel with the MoF’s efforts to implement
the government’s ‘modernization programme’, which was
introduced in 1983. As a part of this programme, the MoF
published a range of papers - known as the SØS-publica-
tions – with new standards for conducting management
accounting drawing on general elements of NPM dis-
courses. The Of?ce referred to these publications as audit-
ing premises (the knowledge base) for the conduct of
performance auditing. Later in 1999, the Of?ce published
its own document ‘Excellent governmental management
accounting’, which forms part of the ‘knowledge base’
(Power, 1996). The MoF and the Of?ce have variously
pointed to the need for government agencies to calculate
and disclose unit cost information.
The issue of independence also relates to the Of?ce. The
National Audit Of?ce Act states ‘‘In its activities, the Audi-
tor-General acts independently” S. 1, (3). Even though the
meaning of the text is a bit ambiguous, it uses the term
independence, which corresponds to the general expecta-
tions that the Of?ce is an independent body to assure and
check whether expenses have been used in accordance with
legislation and appropriations have been used with deliber-
ate attention to economy, ef?ciency and effectiveness. This
development is re?ected in their public communications as
outlined on their Internet page ‘‘the Of?ce is the indepen-
dent control body of the government. By auditing state
funds, it contributes to encouraging an ef?cient and legal
administration” (Internet page, January 2008). In the very
same statement, they also communicate the impression of
being ‘‘objective, professional and responsible”.
The Auditor-General can decide to initiate speci?c
audits, but often the parliamentary Finance Committee or
members of parliament also put pressure on the Of?ce to
conduct audit reviews in cases involving a heated debate
on various policies. In order to demonstrate independence
from the government and the parliament, the PAC’s Inter-
net page emphasises that it is only the PAC that can request
the Of?ce to conduct certain audits. When describing an-
other important aspect of the audit regulations it appears
from the Of?ce Act, S.18, (2) that ‘‘within four months of
completing the (Ed. audit) report and two months after
the PAC has forwarded the audit report, the minister will
make a statement about the measures and considerations
caused by the report” (italics added). Thus, the law states
that it is compulsory to suggest that speci?c measures are
taken (i.e. to initiate proper actions to meet critiques). Since
it is up to the auditee to suggest measures the Of?ce can in
principle avoid presenting recommendations and delimit
themselves to just pinpoint criticisms. Of?cially, it is the
minister responsible for the audited agency who forwards
a note to the PAC. Afterwards, the PAC writes a statement
that is printed in the ?nal audit report. Even though there
have been a few debates about the Of?ce and also its orga-
nizational af?liation to the parliament and the PAC, the Of-
?ce has ever since 1975 been granted a high level of
legitimacy in its audit activities. The Of?ce reports and
PAC conclusions are regularly being quoted by the press
without critical debate about the reports themselves. Only
rarely is the Of?ce or PAC being criticised publicly.
From the beginning of the 1980s, the Of?ce and the PAC
conducted several audit activities within the DDF. The DDF
was deeply engaged in the Cold War and this meant that it
was a place of high secrecy. Several times the DDF referred
to security issues when rejecting the need for increased
transparency. Over the years, the PAC became increasingly
annoyed with the lack of reforms. PAC members were very
active in encouraging the Of?ce to increase its audit efforts
within the DDF. One of them - a member of a party against
militarism – is quoted by an of?cer for stating at the end of
the1980s ‘‘of all the audit cases, only the DDF is still not in
order”. Another highly in?uential social democrat, and for-
mer Minister, stated while she was the acting chairman of
the PAC that after the Berlin wall had fallen, there was no
excuse for not conducting a thorough audit of the DDF. The
general political ‘climate’ also played an important role in
the audit processes of the DDF. As an of?cer points out
‘‘At the time in the late 80’s, it was a widely held assump-
tion that we did not need the DDF” (of?cer).
On the organizational context of the DDF it appears that
the correspondence between the Of?ce and the DDF in-
volves both the MoD to which the audit correspondence
is directed and the Defence Command Denmark that after-
wards receive it from the Ministry. The centre for develop-
ing the DeMars project is located in the Defence Command
as a unit above the weapon arts: navy, army and air force.
The last historical issue which became linked to the la-
ter developments of the DeMars-project relates to the
development of IT-systems in other parts of the State. In
the Danish Job Centre a large IT-system called Amanda
was developed at the same time as an IT-system developed
in the Danish Ministry of Education known as the VUE-
system. Both systems were approved by the Finance
Committee of the parliament but ended up severely mal-
functioning with huge budget overruns. Both cases raised
concerns in the Finance Committee when the DDF applied
for funding to develop DeMars. It is this organizational and
historical context that leads up to the development of
DeMars.
976 P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987
The case account starts in the late 80s with NAOD pub-
lishing reports criticising DDF accounting systems. Those
activities led to the formation of the DeMap-group in
1995 that worked to develop a programme of total cost.
In 1996, the DeMars-groups was formed and together with
the DeMap-group they created the Document 140 to be
approved by the Finance Committee of parliament. The
DeMars-group chose in 1999 SAP Ltd. to be the provider
of the ERP-system SAP R/3. In 1999 and 2001, NAOD com-
mented on the designs in DeMars that of?cially came in
use in 2004. NAOD evaluated the DeMars-project in the
periods 1999–2002 and 2005–2006. A time line of
the main events is presented in Fig. 1 as a summary of
the above historical exposition.
Auditor manoeuvres and making the DDF’s military
activities auditable
Problematization
After the Berlin wall came down in 1989, the Of?ce was
ready to ful?l the wishes of the PAC to strengthen the audit
activities within the DDF. The whole process was opened
with an audit of the overall management accounting
system within the DDF. According to the report (9/91),
the audit’s purpose was to ‘‘analyse and assess whether
the management accounting within the DDF mirrors the
requirements that can be de?ned for modern public sector
accounting” ( Rigsrevisionen, 1993, p. 7). In their review,
they found that the DDF’s accounting system, at the time
called ‘FØRST’, failed to provide ‘‘trustworthy information
on productivity” (p. 11). Implied in this idea of generating
productivity measures and unit costs is the challenge of
de?ning end products as cost objects. During the Of?ce’s
work on the report some of?cers were sceptical about
the whole idea of identifying the military activities as
‘products’. The auditors concluded in their report that it
is not dif?cult to produce ‘‘accounting information related
to products and production means or to de?ne end prod-
ucts or support products for the DDF” (p. 10).
The Of?ce continued to demand that the DDF should in-
crease their efforts to de?ne ‘‘products and activities that
can be measured in quantitative terms” (p. 10). In this
report, the use of IT-systems also came under scrutiny.
The Of?ce concluded that the FØRST-system ‘‘is not suc-
cessful in terms of management control, productivity
measures and cost information” (p. 11). As required by Of-
?ce Act S. 18, (2) the auditee must make a statement about
various measures. These measures have already been
presented to auditors before the closure of the report.
The DDF is quoted in the report for promising to set up a
number of committees to evaluate ‘‘the relations between
?nancial accounting, cost management, productivity
measures, external and internal accounts (reports) and
information systems” (Rigsrevisionen, 1993, p. 11).
The DDF’s promise to let committees assess the possi-
bilities for developing the accounting systems did not
seem to impress the PAC, who in their comments to the re-
port stated ‘‘The PAC expects real measures rather than
committees and plans” (p. 51). The pressure was enforced
by another audit review to problematize the Army’s
accounting systems. The link between the earlier report
9/91 (Rigsrevisionen, 1993) and this newer report 15/92
(Rigsrevisionen, 1994), can be seen from a statement on
p. 9 ‘‘there is a need to systematically analyse the DDF
and the Army’s measurements of production” (italics
added). Also, the Of?ce disapproved both the overall IT-
system FØRST and the Army’s IT-system.
The reports gained additional weight from yet a further
report from the Of?ce. In its annual report to the parlia-
ment, it stated that ‘‘there is a need for new accounting
systems within the DDF” (Rigsrevisionen, 1994, p. 13).
Meanwhile, multiple memos and letters were written be-
tween the Of?ce and the DDF. Also, the MoF supported
the problematization in letters criticising the DDF for its
lack of modern accounting systems. The pressure on the
DDF was growing, but due to their identity as independent
auditors, the Of?ce could not start initiatives themselves.
They had to rely on entities within the DDF.
During the heated debates in 1993–94, a couple of of?-
cers within the Defence Command Denmark (the head-
quarters of DDF) were beginning to think of possible
solutions to the unavoidable request. These senior of?cers
had the obligation to write answers to the continued cri-
tiques presented by the Of?ce and the MoF. They thought
that adjustments could be made to the accounting systems
that are already in place. However, in moments of contin-
ued critique they became frustrated and began to think in
terms of accounting systems used in private companies.
1989 –1996,
NAOD and MoF
reports
problematizing the
accounting systems
of DDF
1995,
DeMap-
Group
settled
1996,
DeMars
Group
settled
1998, Document 140
approved by
Finance Committee to
initiate the DeMars-
project
2007 -
DeMarsstill
under
development
May 2004,
SAP R/3
system
officially in
use
1999 –2002,
NAOD reports
positively
times on the
effectiveness
of DeMars
In 1999 and 2001,
the NAOD
commented on the
designs in DeMars
1999, SAP
A/S chosen
as software
provider
2005 –2006,
NAOD reports
Positively
on the
effectiveness
of DeMars
Fig. 1. Major events of the DeMars-projects.
P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987 977
When looking to the private sector they realized that many
Danish companies were implementing SAP R/3. If private
companies were doing so, the DDF could do the same,
and that when having done so, the DDF would avoid fur-
ther critiques. Being supported by the Chief of Defence
and the MoD, the DeMap-group was formed so as to de?ne
the ways in which an accounting system could be devel-
oped. This work ended up in a programme called the´ prin-
ciple of total cost’ as the obligatory passage point.
In Fig. 2
2
, the entities of the DeMars network are summa-
rised with respect to the types of entities that are identi?ed
as network partners. The DeMap-group ended up perform-
ing the role as being the instigators that could help handle
the critiques emerging from the Of?ce and MoF by leading
the work to implement the new ‘principle of total cost’.
But the group did not delimit the programme by identifying
themselves as being the only parties interested in it. They
also identi?ed the MoF and the Of?ce as having interests
in being alliance partners as modernizers during the execu-
tion of the programme. Further, in close collaboration with
the MoF and the Of?ce, they identi?ed additional entities
with certain roles and identities. Among them were the Par-
liament with its Finance Committee MPs seeking to realize
their interest in modernizing the administration and realize
increased accountability; the MoD seeking to get rid of Of-
?ce criticisms; the DDF’s top management hoping to demon-
strate that the DDF has excellent management accounting
systems; and, the of?cers attempting to manoeuvre with
the identity as ‘manager’ together with the identity as
‘warrior’.
But for these entities with prede?ned aspirations, a ser-
ies of obstacles lay ahead. Will the programme overcome all
sorts of conceptual and technical problems of con?guring
the future IT-systems? Will of?cers (eager to acquire mili-
tary expertise) ?nd the manager role attractive? Will the
DeMap-group succeed in convincing of?cers of the ‘princi-
ple of total cost’? Will the Finance Committee (eager to
avoid public scandals) stop the programme before it is ?n-
ished? Will top management (eager to retain authority with
of?cers) take steps to stop the project, or will the MoD’s civil
servants (eager to protect the Minister of Defence) stop the
programme? These obstacles and related over?owing must
be overcome in order to stabilise the programme. To lock
the allies into place a whole range of different interesse-
ment devices are developed (Callon, 1986).
The devices of interessement
The devices of interessement are, according to Callon
(1986, p. 207), formed and adjusted only during action.
One contentious issue that came up early in the process
was the identi?cation of ‘products’ as cost objects. When
of?cers were thinking in terms of ‘products’ they instantly
began thinking in terms of exercising sovereignty over the
Danish territory, eventually by ?ghting wars or being pres-
ent with arms. But it was quite clear that Denmark had not
recently fought so many wars so it did not make much
sense to measure martial outcomes in a formal system.
Additionally, it was problematic to measure the number
of potential enemies who were abstaining from developing
interests in attacking Denmark.
But when the DeMap-group came under hard pressure
from the Of?ce, it facilitated the identi?cation of the edu-
cated forces as cost objects and quanti?cation became pos-
sible. For example, how much ammunition and hours at
the shooting range were used in the training programs?
Thus the unit cost of educating a soldier, a group, a battal-
ion, a regiment can be calculated and the costs of different
units could, in principle, be compared.
Entities
Officers Top management
group in the
Defence
DeMap-group The National
Audit Office of
Denmark
The Public
Accounts
Committe of
the Danish
Parliament.
OPP/
Obstacles
That the
possibilities for
military activities
are not
destroyed due to
accounting
Sharing
responsibility and
risk with MoF and
NAOD
OPPeMars,
Total cost.
To convince the top
management of the
DDF and to keep
them on 'track'.
That the NAOD's
image as the
Parliament's
independent
auditors is not
damaged.
Goals of
entities/
Identities
Manager
and Warrior
To demonstrate
modern
management as
strategists
To implement
DeMars to help the
DDF to get rid of
NAOD/MOF
criticism.
Modernizer
To help NAOD in its
audit activities. Men of
restoring order
Ministry of
Defence
(Minister)
That no scandals
appear because it
gives the minister
problems towards the
Parliament
Compliance with
pressures from
NAOD/MoF and PAC.
Finance
Committee of
the Danish
Parliament
That the
system does
not collapse
and become
a scandal
The efficient
approval of
investment
proposals
as MPs.
Can officers
be convinced
of the
'principle of
total cost'?
Fig. 2. The DeMap/DeMars-networks: obstacles and OPP = obligatory passage points.
2
This ?gure is an developed version of Fig. 2 in Skrbk & Thorbjørnsen
(2007).
978 P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987
The ‘principle of total cost’ became transferred to the
DeMars-project which set out to invest in an ERP-system
(SAP R/3) to anchor the programme into a technological
arrangement. In the system, and more precisely in the
Enterprise Controlling module, a wide range of military
and administrative units became de?ned. With such cate-
gories, the inputs and outputs could be recorded and allo-
cated to units, purposes and places enabling unit costs to
be calculated. Of?cers, other soldiers and civilians were re-
quired to register all sorts of events in the system. Hun-
dreds of computers were being distributed among of?ces
and many IT-consultants were hired to programme the
SAP R/3 software to ?t with these categories and establish
links between the various parts of the system. Costs of re-
sources now had to be recorded and allocated to the de-
?ned cost pools and the use of different support
products, stock ?uctuations and so forth had to be
recorded.
Further interessement devices such as many different
guidelines for various actors participating in the running
and use of the system were made. In addition, training in
the guidelines was also held to make sure the users do
the right things, such as entering the correct accounts
and entering the numbers in the right sequence. Without
the substantial and almost endless sets of investments in
such devices the whole framing of the network and the
identi?ed actors would not have been feasible.
From the ERP other identities emerged, for instance,
that of a ‘super user’. Super users are persons trained in
using the SAP R/3-system, who know the technicalities of
how to change categories, to print reports and communi-
cate with yet other ‘system operators’. Of?cers up to the le-
vel of captains were being trained as super users. As
implementation progressed, sergeants and senior ser-
geants were also being transformed into super users in this
way assisting higher ranking of?cers at battalion level who
operate as managers. With the possibility of printing all
sorts of reports to report on all aspects of performance,
meetings could be arranged to accommodate interactions
among of?cers (as superiors and/or budget holders), con-
trollers, accountants, internal auditors and even auditors
of the Of?ce. The of?cers in such encounters need to dem-
onstrate accounting expertise.
During these processes of interessement, the Of?ce
was not passively awaiting the ?nal result. For instance,
in an audit report (3/98) the Of?ce followed the imple-
mentation of various parts of the system. In this report,
they reminded the DeMars-group of certain things,
among them that ‘‘It is the view of Of?ce that it is of vital
importance, that the making up of productivity and effec-
tiveness is based upon consistent and reliable sets of data
(Rigsrevisionen, 1999, p. 56). In a stream of later reports
they also commented on the use of a risk management
system (Rigsrevisionen, 2001), the initiated training and
plans of education (Rigsrevisionen, 2005) in this way par-
ticipating in the construction of the interessement de-
vices. However, despite these efforts to ?x the identities
of of?cers and others involved in the innovation, success
is never assured (Callon, 1986, p. 211). For the innovation
to succeed, identi?ed entities must let themselves enrol
into the construction.
Processes of enrolment
To ease enrolment involves further processes of negoti-
ations and tricks. Physical violence, seduction, transaction
and consent illustrate the different possible ways in which
the actors are enrolled (Callon, 1986, p. 214). Actors such
as the Parliament, the PAC, the MoF and the MoD were
more or less easily enrolled into the construction. How-
ever, the of?cers were not. From the very beginning there
was severe scepticism among of?cers at all levels towards
the project since it required them to be equipped with a
computer to conduct various accounting tasks and to per-
form with the new hybrid identity as ‘warrior and man-
ager’. But what types of multilateral negotiations took
place to ease enrolment of the of?cers?
From the very beginning of the problematizations of the
Of?ce some of?cers found that the Of?ce was forcing the
DeMars-project and not acting as an ‘independent auditor’,
which in itself produced over?owing.
There was an auditor in the Of?ce who in 1991 con-
cluded that there was disorder in the DDF’ public
accounts. This was totally wrong. We could prove that
he was wrong. We had followed the instructions (SØS-
publications), which were actually just guide lines from
the MoF in every detail. We had a ?ght with him for
more than a year. He was almost convinced, but said
he was expected to ?nd ‘something’. We found that
the Of?ce was a highly non-democratic institution. . .
we were forced to accept a premise that was not cor-
rect. They actually interfere and indirectly become
involved in politics. In this way, they may actually vio-
late the Danish constitution, according to which the
Of?ce shall be an independent body. I considered writ-
ing about this in the press, but I never did so (of?cer).
The DDF could not avoid taking the critique serious
since the Of?ce’s Act S. 18 stipulates that the auditee (the
Minister of Defence) is required to make a statement about
measures and considerations. The of?cer here criticises the
‘knowledge base’ upon which the Of?ce claims its exper-
tise justi?cation. He refers to the SØS-publications, which
in his view have no legislative status. They are just White
Papers or guidelines that have not been approved by the
parliament. Therefore, he found that the Of?ce was making
its own rules, which he saw as being illegal in a democratic
sense. However, we see that the Of?ce became closely re-
lated to the government’s modernization programme such
that it could manoeuvre within the DDF to ‘modernize’ it.
However, the of?cer cited above saw such manoeuvring
with an identity as ‘modernizer’ as being in con?ict with
the Of?ce’s identity as being an ‘independent auditor’.
As soon as of?cers began to engage in preparing them-
selves for operating with the new hybrid identity as ‘war-
rior and manager’ they became very critical of the whole
idea of transforming the DDF into a ‘manufacturing’
company
The Of?ce was trying to develop models that were
meeting the request for providing unit costs, i.e. to
manage the DDF as a manufacturing company. As soon
as we said that, we offended many of my colleagues. We
P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987 979
said the DDF is a manufacturing company, they said we
are the Armed Forces (senior of?cer).
The quotation shows that the Of?ce’s criticism was a
challenge to many of?cers operating with the identity as
‘warriors’. Many soldiers, and especially of?cers, were
sceptical because they feared that their access to instigate
military commands would be ‘restricted by accountants’.
The of?cers did not seem to surrender. Owing to this pres-
sure, a General said publicly ‘‘If they will not loyally imple-
ment the system, then we will have to use the command
structure”. In the end, the use of the command structure
would imply the risk of being court-martialled and a fur-
ther risk of imprisonment as a sort of physical violence.
This announcement was later criticised by a DDF informant
who told a journalist from Jyllands-Posten – a conservative
national newspaper - to quote him as saying ‘‘DeMars is an
ordered success” (Jyllands-Posten, 24/10 2002a).
3
A whole
stream of over?ows was generated causing trouble for the
proponents and others.
New sets of over?owing were generated. An episode
developed due to the previous experience with unmanage-
able IT-systems in other government agencies. The De-
Mars-group mobilised a risk management system as a
way of anticipating and handling the problems that might
arise. The risk management system might be seen to antic-
ipate and handle the externalities generated by DeMars. By
means of the system, they produced a number of risk anal-
ysis reports. Paradoxically ‘‘Suddenly one large report ex-
ploded in our hands because someone within the DDF
leaked a report to the press” (senior of?cer). Unexpectedly,
the risk management system produced reports describing
so many problems that it caused someone to leak the re-
ports to the press and the Of?ce. In Jyllands-Posten, a jour-
nalist was able to provide new headlines ‘‘DDF: New
problems for the DDF’s IT-system.” (Jyllands-Posten, 24/
10, 2002a). The article reported ‘‘the highly ambitious IT-
system DeMars is in trouble. This is what the DDF now
acknowledges for the ?rst time in a note that ‘has been
leaked from the house’.” (Jyllands-Posten, 24/10, 2002a).
The report was pointing to huge ?nancial problems with
budget overruns and excessive costs used at DeMars, and
according to the newspaper but taken from other budgets
(building maintenance) within the DDF.
In order to ease the enrolment of of?cers, their account-
ing expertise became part of the career planning and
advancement system in the military hierarchy. Participa-
tion in accounting training and education now became re-
corded in the HR-module of the SAP-system. Of?cers were
sent to universities, Business Schools and Academies to be
trained in accounting. The negotiations here taking place
implied that the DDF should bear all the costs of attending
such training and education. The rationale could be that if
the of?cers better understood accounting, perhaps they
could be seduced into accepting the new identity. But even
such activities were not enough. The head of the account-
ing department chose to dismiss a handful of of?cers who
were late in their careers. They were said not to possess
‘proper’ accounting expertise. Such an event shocked many
of?cers now being more motivated to attend training in
accounting.
To sum up, the description shows how the identities of
the of?cers within the DDF have been caught up in the pro-
cesses caused by the DeMars-project. The introduction of
the DeMars system destabilized the occupational identity
of the of?cers as persons training and leading soldiers into
combat. The ‘commodi?cation issue’ generated a pressure
to de?ne their identity as a ‘manager’. Many frustrations
and con?icts escalated and caused several of?cers to be-
come sceptical and yet again for some to engage in inform-
ing the press of all the various troubles with the project.
For the individual soldiers, it was a dif?cult process. It
was dif?cult to know whether it was desirable to help han-
dling the over?owing or whether it was wise to participate
in the production of them. In terms of the groups of of?-
cers, we have seen how the proponents of DeMars devel-
oped skills to handle the over?owing and to ease
enrolment. Beyond this, they also developed skills to han-
dle the Of?ce, the Finance Committee and others, con-
structing them and turning them into partners. For them,
the over?owing was unexpected and their identities were
at stake. Would they be pinpointed as persons who did
something good, or would they be identi?ed as persons
who did the opposite? At least, they created long careers.
Their early retirement was delayed and they were turned
into well-paid consultants. In this case, the audit had im-
mense implications for the people employed at this work-
place. But how was it at all made feasible that the few
proponents and some auditors of the Of?ce could come
to speak on behalf of the of?cers, politicians and civil ser-
vants? This issue is addressed in the section below.
Mobilisation
To answer the question of who speaks in the name of
whom and how actual mobilisation is achieved we have
to illuminate the work involved with getting the green
light of the parliament to initiate the project and how the
masses of of?cers became displaced in a series of auditor
reports being put in circulation performing the work of
puri?cation.
It has already been described how the Of?ce and the
MoF problematized the accounting systems of the DDF.
Being equipped with the Of?ce audit reports and the MoF
criticism, the DeMap-group was able to work on a larger
report, the FORSTYR report in which the need for a new
ERP-system was outlined. However, the instigators were
closely manoeuvring together with the Of?ce. In one of
its reports the Of?ce recognized that the DDF had initiated
DeMars stating that ‘‘the Of?ce will continuously follow
the development of the DDF’s accounting systems project
by having a project steering group monitoring the develop-
ment” (Rigsrevisionen, 1996, p. 37). This committed the
audit of?ce to involvement in, and the ultimate success
of the DeMars-project.
From the very beginning the Of?ce participated in that
work. Later the MoF joined the group. The report (FORS-
3
Other newspapers than Jyllands-Posten wrote frequently about the
problems of DeMars. Here I refer primarily to this newspaper because it
wrote with the highest intensity and with the higher levels of detail.
980 P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987
TYR report) was published in June 1995 and accepted
by the MoD, the Of?ce and the MoF accepted his report.
Certain people made sure that there was wide support
behind this signi?cant and far reaching change before
it was started (of?cer).
The instigating of?cers were trying to enrol the Of?ce
and the MoF representatives into the network and to ?x
their identity as ‘modernizers’. In February 1998 with
the FORSTYR report being praised by the MoF and the
Of?ce, it was subsequently circulated to the parliament’s
Finance Committee together with a proposal document
to formally decide to invest in a new ERP-system. On
this basis the Committee approved Statute 140, which
provided legal access for the DeMars-group to invest
around £75 million in an ERP-system. From this time
onwards the Of?ce became considerably more friendly
towards the DDF in its reports. This is seen in the Of?ce
annual report (Rigsrevisionen, 1998) of 1996, in which it
praised the DDF for being ready to develop the DeMars-
project.
After the approval the project group began to prepare
tender documents. In the pre-quali?cation round, three
companies of ?ve were chosen. After this episode and a
somewhat problematic tendering with a lot of hidden de-
bates among the ERP-suppliers and very sceptical consul-
tancy companies, the SAP Ltd. was chosen to deliver the
SAP R/3-system to replace more than 60 IT-systems within
the DDF. Subsequently, a large number of consultants
started to work, many committees were set up, new func-
tions were created and many soldiers and of?cers became
involved or entirely dedicated in various ways. In moments
of mobilisation, thousands of people were either involved
or affected by DeMars.
But the issue of the Of?ce’s role became the object of
discussion
The MoF, the Of?ce and others had a hidden agenda.
They decided that the only place such a huge project
could be implemented was the DDF. Therefore, the
Of?ce was sitting at the end of the table when DeMars
was decided (of?cers).
This illustrates how the Of?ce was manoeuvring with
the identity as ‘modernizer’ in the period around the deci-
sion to implement DeMars. But also it could manoeuvre
with the identity as an ‘independent auditor’. Several
MPs from various parties also expressed their concern in
the press under the headline ‘‘MPs fear a new IT-scandal”
(Jyllands-Posten, 18/2 1998). To reduce such worries, the
Of?ce chose to comment on the DeMars-project in their
1996 annual report (Rigsrevisionen, 1998) to the parlia-
ment where the Auditor-General assured that the DeMars
‘‘will solve all signi?cant problems. . .” (Rigsrevisionen,
1998, p. 19).
By providing such a positive appraisal of the whole pro-
ject, the Of?ce used its annual report to purify the DeMars-
project. As media in broad circulation, the annual report of
the Of?ce is as ‘the’ ?nal report to the parliament granted a
high justi?cation. The fact that the Of?ce committed itself
so directly to the DeMars project should also be seen in the
context of the large scepticism among several MPs of the
Finance Committees about the ‘unmanageable’ IT-system
developments (the Amanda and VUE scandals, as men-
tioned in Section 4).
But the manoeuvring and the proper identity of the Of-
?ce became a heated issue. In the PAC, certain concerns
emerged about whether the Of?ce was involved with the
DeMars project as a consultant giving advices rather than
just recommendations. Froma document of the Of?ce (Rigs-
revisionen, 1999, p. 1) to the PAC, the Auditor-General
promised to make a statement of its engagement with the
DeMars-project. Even though this statement for some un-
known reason was never made, it did not hinder the Of?ce
from performing the work of puri?cation in two later
episodes.
The Of?ce’s attempts of technical puri?cation 1999–2002
In the year after the approval of Statute 140, the Finance
Committee was recurrently concerned with the implemen-
tation of DeMars. An issue of whether the DDF has spent
more money than granted by the parliament emerged
and was referred to in the (tabloid) newspaper (Ekstra Bla-
det 13/2, 2002). Anonymous of?cers in the DDF later went
public with the accusation that money was transferred
from the DDF’s ordinary budget to the DeMars-project. In
newspaper articles, a journalist quoted an associate profes-
sor in computer science, by now identi?ed as one of the
leading computer experts in Denmark, as saying ‘‘The cre-
ative camou?age technique to ?nance investments from
ordinary appropriations is something we have seen in the
IT-scandals, Amanda and VUE” (Jyllands-Posten, 10/11,
2002b). Later, in the very same article, the chairman of
the PAC was quoted as saying ‘‘In the end, it should be
interesting to see how much money has been spent within
or outside the appropriation”. He did not point to any lar-
ger and more serious troubles.
In contrast, an external consultant pointed to serious
troubles with implementing the costing principle in the
DeMars system. He was concerned about the develop-
ment and found that the controlling unit of SAP R/3 with
all the cost calculations and transfer prices was turning
into a ‘mess’. He wrote to the instigators, whom he char-
acterized as the ‘grey eminencies’, since he was not al-
lowed to talk to them directly. He assessed that DKK
500 million (£45 million) had been lost. He pointed out
that so many efforts had been directed towards develop-
ing the costing principle that they had forgotten to handle
the appropriations in the ?nancial unit of SAP. At the
time, the DDF appropriations were out of control. There
was a de?cit of approx. DKK 150–200 million on the
DDF’s ordinary appropriations (approximately £18 mil-
lion), (Rigsrevisionen, 2003, p. 5). Having identi?ed the
problem, the PAC ordered the Of?ce to explain the miss-
ing millions. The Of?ce’s response – now manoeuvring
with the identity as an independent auditor – in report
(A303/03) was as follows:
Our examination has shown that the problems of con-
trol are not related to DeMars, because in the examina-
tion no weaknesses of the system have been identi?ed
in relation to budgeting and evaluation. (Rigsrevisionen,
2003, p. 42).
P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987 981
In this report, the Of?ce puri?ed DeMars in a technical
sense by arguing that the problems were not related to
DeMars. However, the Of?ce’s claim was not challenged
by anybody willing to go to the press or other bodies.
The consultant had no incentive to go to the press be-
cause as he said in the interview ‘‘then I would be ?n-
ished as a consultant”. This points to the case that in
practice the audit report was not open for public scrutiny.
Also, the of?cers with insights would face serious risks of
missing promotion if they intervened in the public de-
bate. In this way, the Of?ce helped to maintain the
spokesmen role of the instigating of?cers and to stabilise
the construction.
That the Of?ce succeeded manoeuvring with the iden-
tity as ‘independent auditor’ relates to the way it con-
structed its report. It did not just uncritically accept
everything about the DeMars-project. It did point to some
problems with the management control part. However, the
Of?ce stated that the problems were due to the lack of va-
lid numbers from several authorities within the DDF and in
this way it indirectly criticised the of?cers manning the
computers and being responsible for recordings. But to
outsiders such problems can be solved with better training
and discipline. In this way, the Of?ce tried to create trust-
worthiness to their report by including some ‘free secrets’
(Goffman, 1959) about some problems that in the present
situation were without any signi?cant implications. Purify-
ing as an independent auditor that in other (but related)
moments operates with other identities such as ‘modern-
izer’ implies that something must be criticised to perform
with a ‘balanced view’. Even though some persons ex-
pressed doubts about the reports during these events the
Of?ce succeeded in purifying DeMars in a technical sense
and to sort out the emergent over?owing by silencing
the sceptical politicians and of?cers. But that effect did
not last for long.
Second attempts of puri?cation and closure 2005–2006
In the summer 2005, the episodes from 2002 returned
with a new intensity, which perhaps produced more
heated over?owing than ever before in the ‘life’ of DeMars.
Of?cers found that the system was scandalous and a waste
of time. Therefore, some leaked stories to the press creat-
ing further over?owing. Jyllands-Posten had received
‘unpublished’ statements on DeMars fromthe Of?ce leaked
by an unknown person. In the documents, the Of?ce ex-
pressed some concern about DeMars ‘‘. . ..there has been a
lack of process understanding and data discipline, and
there has been a lack of instructions and guidance” (Jyl-
lands-Posten, 5/6 2005a) concluding that this is ‘less satis-
factory’. However, this is not severe criticism by the Of?ce.
In the article, the journalist commented on the notes
While the tone of the Of?ce is critical towards the DDF’s
use of the system, which is called DEtrash by the users,
the Of?ce accept uncritically the accounts of the
DeMars-project made by the DDF (Jyllands-Posten 5/6,
2005a).
The journalist also contacted a highly in?uential MP,
Peter Skaarup (member of the government’s supporting
party), who was critical of the Of?ce
You get the feeling that the Of?ce has approved the
budgetary aspects with a rubber stamp to avoid admit-
ting that its control through the years has been insuf?-
cient. . . The Of?ce has done nothing to verify the
information.. if we were talking about real auditing,
they would not just refer to what has been stated (Jyl-
lands-Posten 5/6, 2005a).
Instead of directing questions towards the Of?ce or the
PAC, Peter Skaarup decided that he would direct his ques-
tions about DeMars to the Minister of Defence. The Audi-
tor-General replied to the journalist by saying that the
note was only a working paper, which he himself had not
seen. The day after the article had been published in Jyl-
lands-Posten, the journalist contacted another MP
Now, the DeMars system has to be investigated in
greater depth. Holger K. Nielsen, SF’s (Ed. left wing
party) spokesperson on DDF matters will take the initia-
tive. I will send a letter to the chairman of the PAC,
Peder Larsen, (also representing SF). I will ask him and
the committee to ensure that an audit report is made
to uncover the real budgetary overruns of DeMars
(Jyllands-Posten, 6. June, 2005b).
As a result of this request, the Of?ce announced that
they would publish a new report in November, 2005 (Rigs-
revisionen, 2005). In this report, the Of?ce provided the re-
sults of their review. Even though Holger K. Nielsen, MP,
asked for a review of the costs of DeMars the Of?ce also re-
viewed some technological aspects of DeMars. In the 30
page report, 5 pages are about the ?nancial aspects of De-
Mars and about 20 pages are on the use of DeMars. In the
?rst ?ve pages, an introduction is given to the report. From
page seven it appears that the Of?ce now manoeuvred
with the identity as an ‘independent auditor’ by saying
The military headquarters is responsible for the devel-
opment and the use of DeMars. The investigation is
therefore delimited to encompass the MoD, the DDF
Command Denmark and af?liated authorities (Ed. army,
navy, air force, etc. (Rigsrevisionen, 2005, p. 7).
On the heated debate in the parliament about the costs
of DeMars, the Of?ce concludes at page 18
That the account of the project is correct. The assess-
ment is in addition drawn on the case that the DDF
has acquired and used DeMars and increased its ?nan-
cial consumption by DKK 35 million, which gives a
3.1% budget overrun compared to the adjusted budget
of 2001 (Rigsrevisionen, 2005, p. 18).
In this practice of puri?cation, establishing categories
such as ‘correct’ or ‘not correct’, the Of?ce ended up puri-
fying the DDF’s ?nancial statement on DeMars. But also
generally on the technological aspects the Of?ce praised
the system. It did so while manoeuvring as an ‘indepen-
dent auditor’, but simultaneously also manoeuvring as
‘modernizer’ by pointing to further challenges for the
DDF on what is so important to the Of?ce, namely the issue
of cost allocations
It is the assessment of the Of?ce that DeMars has now
been implemented satisfactorily . . .. Though there is
982 P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987
still a job to work with the cost apportionments. A cer-
tain part of the costs can only be allocated through
some cost driver rates (Rigsrevisionen, 2005, p. 28).
However, the debate and the new report did not touch
upon the accusation of the Of?ce being a ‘dependent audi-
tor’. But how could it happen that the auditor did not com-
ment on an issue that the MPs had raised? In an interview,
the chairman of the PAC said ‘‘we cannot accept that the
Of?ce involves itself in active consulting”. However, we
must also pay attention to another quotation by the chair-
man of the PAC
It is not our task to criticise decisions of the parliament.
When the parliament has made a decision, the of?cials
have to implement it. We will not assess whether the
requirements of the parliament are fair or not. If they
say that the law of gravitation does not exist, then we
do not say that it does. Perhaps we are skeptical as pri-
vate persons, but we have to respect the parliamentary
decisions (Chairman of the PAC).
Within the PAC, efforts are made to avoid situations in
which authority and belief in the democratic institutions
are questioned. The PAC, the Of?ce and the parliament
gather to avert any over?owing that may threaten DeMars,
the Of?ce and the parliament. All their identities are at
stake. Many issues concerning DeMars were being dis-
cussed in the DDF, the parliament and the press.
The last audit report about DeMars as mentioned above
was expected to have the effect that any debate about De-
Mars should now stop. However, additional efforts were
necessary to avoid that the report and its conclusions
would be questioned. In the parliament, critical MPs were
convinced that any further debate would be useless. Sur-
prisingly, instead of criticising the Of?ce a journalist could
now write
The much criticised IT-system within the DDF is in
essence a sound business. This is concluded in a new
report from the Of?ce on the largest IT-system in the
history of Denmark (Jyllands-Posten 2/12, 2005c).
To enable such writings in this situation, comprehen-
sive actions are the necessary investments to maintain
the purifying effect of the auditor reports to in?uence pub-
lic opinion. Many actions were necessary to secure the un-
easy role of the Of?ce, and it illustrates how the success of
DeMars and the identities involved are the result of contin-
uous investments.
The independence controversy appeared due to the
unexpected over?owing. Even the dependency controversy
became an over?ow to be cooled. In this situation, the Of-
?ce became dependent on both the government (the DDF)
and the parliament in a wider sense. The Of?ce was partic-
ipating in handling framing and over?owing issues of
DeMars. In this case, the dependency issue was raised in
the press, and even prominent MPs were turning their
attention to the issue. But at the moments of decision,
other MPs turned their attention to the ?nancial issues of
DeMars ‘‘What was the cost of implementing DeMars?”
( Jyllands-Posten 6/6, 2005b). Even the chairman of the
PAC, who had expressed his concern with ‘‘the Of?ce being
a consultant”, was eager to talk about the ?nancial issues
hence realizing new interests. In such political matters,
the PAC transformed itself to an entity that avoided debat-
ing the issue of dependency.
Due to the over?owing, the Of?ce appeared to be in a
situation where it had become a signi?cant partner in cre-
ating DeMars, and in subsequent episodes the Of?ce real-
ized that it would now be dif?cult to criticise DeMars.
Therefore, the many audit notes and reports of the Of?ce
may be identi?ed as instances of auto-audits or self-re-
view. With the help of audit reports, they were able to pur-
ify the constructions in which they participated. In this
situation, the auditors manoeuvred with different identi-
ties and their manoeuvres were possible because the PAC
and the parliament allowed for this possibility. Some
groups criticised the auditors for acting as being a partner
of DeMars, but these efforts were without much success. In
this way, temporal closure has been achieved. But without
the Of?ce manoeuvring with different identities it was
very likely that DeMars would have collapsed and ended
up in a public scandal. But as Callon (1986) points out con-
sensus can be contested at any moment.
Discussion and conclusions
Much has been written about auditing and audit work.
However, few studies have set out to follow the auditors in
action and in practical settings. This paper set out to study
auditors in action and addressed the question of how do
they manoeuvre in various stages of the work to make an
accountability project at all feasible. I relate the description
of this task to three interrelated themes in the audit
literature.
Making ‘‘new” things auditable
The literature on auditing and especially that on making
‘‘new” things auditable (Power, 2003a), such as the ef?-
ciency of the public sector, has grown modestly within
the last decade or so to study how such activity is made
possible. In the study by Gendron et al. (2007) it is shown
how the public sector auditors developed a strategy to be-
come recognized as central in performance measurement.
From the present study it appeared that the Danish Of?ce
developed a similar interest, by participating in the initia-
tion of a project to make the DDF’s ‘ef?ciency’ auditable. It
did so by con?guring its audit reports to facilitate purposes
of problematization. In a number of audit reports they crit-
icised the DDF’s accounting systems and pointed to the
lack of capability to calculate unit costs as a measure of
ef?ciency. But problematization was not limited to the
auditors. A couple of instigating of?cers within the DDF
created a network in which the Of?ce became an impor-
tant actor and ally. As these two actors worked in concert
to initiate the innovation, they made strong references to
the knowledge base of ‘ef?ciency’ in terms of the MoF
and its SØS-publications as a means of claiming legitimacy.
But to get the green light to initiate the innovation, the
instigators, and in this case, the Of?ce had to mobilise
the law of the Of?ce (S.18) which makes it compulsory
P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987 983
for the auditee to identify necessary measures (reforms).
This exhibits the important ?nding that at least in a Danish
context it is within such a re?ned socio-technical audit
framework that the auditee is constructed as an entity,
who needs to be innovative and made receptive to the
audit knowledge base. This adds nuances to Power’s
(1996) description of how it is that consultants are the
new policy makers of the public sector. The present case
illustrates that it is rather the Of?ce and MoF that together
act as policy makers and the ones that make the auditee
receptive.
In addition to the auditors’ efforts in de?ning the audi-
tee in a role to change, the auditee also succeeded in con-
structing the Of?ce as an enrollee into the emergent
construction of innovation. They did so by establishing var-
ious committees and presenting plans and intentions to
the Of?ce and other bodies before deciding to take action.
In further actions relating to all the four moments of mak-
ing an innovation successful, the Of?ce became enrolled to
help the DDF and the government to turn the innovation
(DeMars) into a success. In this way, the problematization
activity was extended to further involve the Of?ce in the
execution of the innovation. This also generated problems
in terms of a lack of independence to which I return below.
Meanwhile, I turn attention to the insights into the disor-
der, in terms of over?owing, created by the innovation.
Instead of theorising disorder as ‘unintended conse-
quences’ or ‘side-effects’, the present case illustrates how
a whole range of over?ows emerged and how they in?u-
enced the constructions while DeMars was being devel-
oped and framed in particular ways. In terms of framing,
a signi?cant project to develop a large IT-system has been
initiated. From the very beginning, many of?cers were
sceptical of the whole project. As the project commenced,
almost all of?cers in the DDF had been enrolled to perform
the role as a ‘manager’ in recording their activities and re-
sults, thus making budgets and accounts operate function-
ally. The system de?ned of?cers in a role where they
should participate in meetings with auditors from the Of-
?ce and auditors and controllers of the DDF. In such
encounters of?cers were expected to discuss the issues of
recording, performance and measurement. The technolo-
gies de?ned the of?cers to perform towards accountants,
auditors and superior managers as audiences. For of?cers
to perform with success in such situations requires
accounting skills in order to be in touch with the account-
ing and audit framework organizing these encounters.
In these encounters, much over?owing was generated.
Among such over?owing was early scepticism of of?cers
with respect to at least six issues. Their concerns were ?rst,
the dif?culty of de?ning relevant cost objects; second, the
use of too much money on such a project; third, the prob-
lems of the consultants and other systems designers to
make things work; fourth, problems that suddenly seemed
to be overwhelming by the actors who felt these problems
were impossible to solve; ?fth, recognition by of?cers that,
in manoeuvring with the hybrid identity doing administra-
tive work, they would lead attention away from their war-
rior identity exercising leadership in training soldiers and
engaging in combat; and ?nally, that the risk management
system itself paradoxically generated over?ows. All such
over?ows recurrently created heated debates inside and
outside the DDF and some of?cers engaged themselves in
bringing forth the descriptions of such problems to the
press thus adding dynamics to the project. New actions
were taken to try to handle such over?owing in terms of
re?ning the constructions. This comprised action to im-
prove the manuals, the training, the categories in the soft-
ware, etc. in potentially endless sets of actions. Some such
instances can be labelled ‘unintended consequences’ but
not the resistance of of?cers. As much as we can talk about
‘intentions’, of?cers must be seen to be intentionally trying
to resist the construction by leaking information to the
press and trying to put pressure on the spokespersons.
Such actions were quite unexpected by the instigators
and other proponents. The identity troubles of the of?cers
(see also Skrbk & Thorbjørnsen, 2007) can also with
meaning be talked about as a ‘‘side-effect”. But the de?ni-
tion of the proper identity as hybrid ‘warrior and manager’
must be seen to be a direct consequence of the very con-
struction in terms of problematization and the technolo-
gies under construction.
Therefore, to make things auditable including by ‘norm’
as Callon (1998b) would say, involves the generation of
over?owing and certain activities generated to contain
those over?ows within the framing. As over?ows are gen-
erated, substantial efforts and frequently substantial
investments are made to secure stabilisation and hinder
the collapse of the construction. The notion of over?owing
informs us that constructions such as accounting innova-
tions can and will at any time generate over?ows as the
construction performs to wider sets of audiences being en-
rolled in certain roles, or more broadly, the public. If over-
?ows are not handled, they come to threaten the
construction. As I will develop in the next section, experts
such as auditors can be of particular help to handle over-
?owing in order to screen out obstacles for the enrolled ac-
tors who are manoeuvring with different identities and
interests.
Auditor reports as devices of puri?cation
In his important study, Pentland (1993) points out that
the processes of ?nancial audit can transform ?nancial
statements of corporate management into trustworthy
publications that produce comfort for the public. In this
way, he drew attention to how audit can create ?nancial
order by purifying the statements made by corporate man-
agement. Later, Power (1996) called attention to the wider
processes of making this possible. He characterizes the
processes to establish a knowledge base and make the
environment receptive to it as fact building which involves
several experts including auditors. For instance, he points
out that the socializing processes of auditors can be seen
as a form of ‘‘institutionalised puri?cation”. To comple-
ment these contributions, the present study shows how
performance auditors of the Of?ce became involved in
activity not to merely purify the DDF’s annual ?nancial
statement but also to purify the technical functioning of
the developed accounting systems and the ad hoc state-
ments made by DDF management on whether the ap-
proved budget for the innovation had been met. On
984 P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987
several occasions, the Of?ce was ordered by the PAC to
conduct audit reviews of the DeMars, it has itself been a
part of. But how can we understand the work of puri?ca-
tion to participate in making the accounting innovation
feasible? The reports were launched in moments where
sceptical of?cers were going public with the criticisms of
the ways in which the systems worked and did not work.
Some of?cers informed critical journalists so as to then
heat the situation by involving MPs of the Finance Com-
mittee operating with the identity as ‘investors’. In such
situations, under attack as being ‘bad investors’ they called
upon the PAC to order the Of?ce to perform audits and to
provide independent and objective information on what
is ‘‘right or wrong” in a codifying practice of puri?cation.
As the case shows, the reports by the Of?ce succeeded in
various episodes in silencing the MPs by providing the con-
clusions that the information circulating in the press was
wrong, and that DeMars was technically and ?nancially
sound.
We usually expect puri?cation to be an activity that
erases the mess of relations, but in this instance it just
did not happen. Some MPs and a associate professor in
computer science criticised the Of?ce for not being inde-
pendent, but this debate ceased. Several allies to the Of?ce
gathered together and worked to protect the Of?ce. This
instance is quite a contrast with regard to other jurisdic-
tions – notably in Australia (Funnell, 1998, 2003) there
the performance auditors became heavily criticised as they
took steps to collect government working documents as
part of the audit. This contrast demonstrates that both per-
formance auditing and the ways the auditors can manoeu-
vre are very much dependent on a variety of related actors
and their relations in the actor-network.
We are thus brought to the issues of the Of?ce’s power
and in?uence. Power (1996) points out that audit is power-
ful but not monolithic. The present case illustrates that
power lies in networks, hence that power is relational just
as are the identities of the participating actors. To say this
also means that audit can be more or less powerful but
never achieve perfection since it is a process of negotiation
with network partners.
Of importance in this process, even though the Of?ce’s
audit reports produced comfort (to the instigating actors,
the parliament and the management of DDF and the broad
public), we should not forget the sceptical of?cers who
were in this process ignored and not listened to. They were
excluded from the negotiations and did not feel comfort-
able. Pentland (1993) and Power (2003) are right when
noting that audit produces comfort and legitimacy but, like
Justesen and Skrbk (2005), the outcome of audits may
also produce discomfort among the employees of the audi-
tee. The troubles, here theorised as over?owing, that the
of?cers felt when operating with the hybrid identity of
‘warrior and manager’ were ignored and imply that the
of?cers are going to live with such discomfort for several
years to come. In moments of being in military combat,
such troubles may increase dramatically but in more
peaceful times and locations such troubles may be less sig-
ni?cant to them. However, the purifying effect may also be
that of?cers came to realize that working against the inno-
vation was a waste of time and instead they resolved to
live with it. But even though audit produces comfort, it is
always less than perfection. If we listen to Callon
(1998b), discomfort in terms of over?owing must be con-
sidered to be the norm rather than the exception. I agree
with Power (2003b) that more attention should be drawn
to the impact of audit on the auditee. But it could be added
that attention to discomfort in terms of over?owing and
emerging concerned groups (Callon, 2003; Skrbk &
Tryggestad, in press) could prove as interesting in terms
of what audit produces. In conclusion, this case study pro-
vides evidence that audit can not only purify ?nancial
statements, but also purify broader organizational arrange-
ments as also Strathern (2006) suggests. But such actions
also have implications in terms of the identity of the audi-
tors as discussed below.
The identities of auditors
In an early article, Power (1996) brie?y refers to how
the processes of auditing have consequences for the ‘‘pro-
fessional” identity of the auditor. This observation was
developed recently by Robson et al. (2007) on how audi-
tors’ engagement with new business areas had implica-
tions for their professional identity. The present study
extends these insights by illuminating the dynamic pro-
cesses of how auditor identity is negotiated and delimited
when being put into action. From the case it appeared that
the Of?ce at the very early moments of the innovation, set
out to problematize the DDF’s accounting systems in terms
of their inability to calculate unit costs as a measure of ef?-
ciency. In doing so they made references to a knowledge
base, which had obvious links to the government’s
modernization programme. Also in the Of?ce’s public com-
munication it appeared explicitly that it ‘‘contributes” to
an ef?cient administration. With congruity in the proble-
matization of the DDF’s activities and the Of?ce’s public
communication on their webpage, the identity of ‘modern-
izer’ and the aspirations to modernize the administration,
emerged. Whereas in the private sector auditors are fre-
quently being criticised for consulting sold on the back of
audit engagements, in the present case this is not exactly
the same issue. The issue here is more complex. The Of?ce
could not carry on without some instigators inside the
DDF. Their simultaneous identity as ‘independent auditor’
delimits them from making the legal act to get the green
light from the parliament to initiate the accountability pro-
ject. However, by establishing close links, for instance, in
participating formally in steering group meetings and
other meetings, the Of?ce became part of the network. In
this, the Of?ce did not just perform work of problematiza-
tion but it also participated with their audit reports being
constructed to circulate ‘independent’ assessments and
criticisms which smoothly developed into the provision
of advice. When over?ows were emerging in terms of tech-
nical problems and resistance of of?cers, the Of?ce partic-
ipated in processes attempting to solve the problems and
to suggest further designs of the devices of interessement
and to ease enrolment of the of?cers.
From the very start, the Of?ce’s manoeuvres as
‘modernizer’ created debates. As the Finance Committee
considered its approval of the statute, the PAC asked the
P. Skrbk / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 971–987 985
Auditor-General to make a statement of how it had partic-
ipated in preparing the statute. Even though such a state-
ment has not been published it demonstrates the
con?icts between being simultaneously a ‘modernizer’
and an ‘independent auditor’. These con?icts escalated in
later processes when the Of?ce was called in to evaluate
the whole project. In this way, the present study is a con-
?rmation of Gendron et al.’s (2001) argument that auditors
cannot claim to behave with independence when they are
involved in something which comes close to proactive con-
sultancy activity. But in contrast to their study this case
shows that even though it became an issue in overall
terms, the negotiations did not lead to the Of?ce being for-
mally or publicly criticised by the PAC or other parliamen-
tary units. They succeeded in operating with the two
identities even though it was not without problems. The
con?icting identities became an over?ow in itself, which
created the need for unexpected actions, for instance, to
end further debate. As already mentioned, this study
shows that in?uential entities de?ne their interests to be
aligned with NAOD as modernizer.
Indeed there is a need to remind society of how to elim-
inate the expectation gap as pointed out by Gendron et al.
(2001) and Everett, Green, and Neu (2005). But part of the
explanation as to how performance auditing seems to be
stabilised, and not to address the gap, is that the Of?ce
helps the parliament to demonstrate a vitality of democ-
racy by modernizing it and maintaining a formal rational-
ity as is also stressed by Radcliffe (1999). The fact that the
Of?ce was able to handle the over?ows generated by
the DeMars-project, contributes to establishing order in
the DDF, in State and thereby parliament. As it appears it
seems like the Danish Of?ce has succeeded in convincing
the spokespersons who speak on behalf of society, of its
expertise. This ?nding con?rms the ?ndings of Gendron
et al. (2007) in a Canadian context.
According to Power (2003b, p. 199) ‘‘It should be recog-
nized that a certain degree of auditor dependence on the
auditee is desirable and necessary”, but it is dif?cult to
anticipate where the limit to ‘a certain degree’ may be, as
is also pointed out by Bowerman, Humphrey, and Owen
(2003). In this case, the Of?ce and the MoF were commit-
ted to make the DDF produce a ‘business case’ for a radical
implementation of the performance-accountability project.
In such a situation, the Of?ce might be tempted to enter a
closer relationship with the auditee than in other less
ambitious situations. The auditor’s manoeuvrability
appears to be conditioned by the situations and the unex-
pected events that they face. Sometimes, the independence
claim is a resource to the auditors, and in other situations,
it is a constraint. However, at least in the Danish DDF con-
text there seem to be strong forces that help to handle the
dependency over?ow when it arises in the processes of
auditors participating in making things auditable.
In future research, how the identities of various groups
of people within the auditee are recon?gured in audit pro-
cesses should attract more attention. This research saw it
in relation to the processes of an accounting innovation,
but how the auditee develops strategies to avoid being
blamed in audits could also prove interesting. Even though
Power (2003b) emphasises that much has been written on
auditors and auditing and therefore argues that we need to
know more about the auditee, still little is known about
how the organizational identities of audit of?ces are recon-
?gured in action, especially as they carry out performance
audits. To follow their manoeuvres in the many different
networks that they become part of can provide additional
insights into how auditors’ and their network partners’
identity aspirations are threatened in various episodes,
and how they work to overcome such situations. In rela-
tion to some of the performance auditing reports here
theorised as devices of puri?cation, I agree with Chua
(2007, p. 409) that it proves interesting to study ‘how
inscriptions are made up and given meaning’. I would
add that performance auditors are also involved with mak-
ing up inscriptions that in various episodes are put into cir-
culation among a variety of audiences to recon?gure their
identities.
Acknowledgements
My particular thanks to Yves Gendron, Mark Christen-
sen, Kjell Tryggestad, Jan Mouritsen, Andrea Mennicken,
Anette Mikes, Thomas Riise Johansen, Poul Erik Christian-
sen, Eija Vinnari and the two anonymous reviewers for the
advice and helpful comments. Also, I gratefully acknowl-
edge valuable comments received from participants at the
CPA conference in Cardiff, 2006, and the workshop on
‘‘Management Accounting as Social and Organizational
Practice”, HEC, Paris, 2008. Special thanks to Mark Christen-
sen for making the English run more smoothly.
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