The concept of accountability has traditionally been considered as the means used to control and direct administrative behavior. It is necessary to make the administration accountable and responsible for what it does to safeguard the common good and provide checks against the arbitrary or despotic exercise of power in polity, administration, and society. With the evolution of the welfare state, there has been a rise in governmental tasks, quantitatively as well as in terms of complexity. Earlier, the functions of the government were limited to the maintenance of law and order and tax collection. However, the welfare state is actively involved in looking after the welfare of its people. The government provides a number of basic amenities and infrastructural facilities to the people. The government has had to increasingly regulate political, social, and economic activity. This has meant the formation of a large bureaucracy that performs various functions of the government. To perform their duties, public servants are given numerous responsibilities and the necessary powers to perform them. They are expected to use their powers to perform their duties well and provide the people with the necessary services. But such vast powers often get misused, and it is to check this misuse that the concepts of administrative accountability and responsibility have evolved.
In public administration, accountability refers to the obligation on the part of public officials to report on the usage of public resources and be answerable for failing to meet stated performance objectives. Integrity refers to honesty or trustworthiness in the discharge of official duties. Transparency refers to unfettered access by the public to timely and reliable information on decisions and performance in the public sector. These principles are co-dependent. Integrity, by requiring that the public interest be paramount, provides the basis for transparency, and without transparency, accountability becomes meaningless and makes a mockery of sound public administration. Accountability depends on transparency or having the necessary information. Transparency is accountability without integrity may not serve the public interest.
S.R. Maheshvari sees administrative accountability as imperative because it purports to evaluate the performance of the organization. The goal is split into different tasks and responsibilities, and the administrators are called upon to render an account of how they are discharging their responsibilities. Concepts like hierarchy, span of control, supervision, and unity of command are there to promote accountability. So, accountability has meaning only when it is linked to the basic tasks and objectives of an organization.
According to O.P. Dwivedi and Joseph G. Jabbra, public service accountability means “methods by which a public agency or a public official fulfills its duties and obligations, and the process by which that agency or the public official is required to account for such actions.” The effectiveness of public administration depends on devising an integrated administrative machinery to accomplish targets with the minimum cost of money and energy and within a specified time.
According to Mohit Bhattacharya, accountability is “the driving force that generates pressures for the key administrative actors to be responsible for and to ensure good public service performance.” He was of the view that accountability and citizen participation are a major concern of public administration, and it “focuses on tuning bureaucratic power and bringing the citizen back into administration.” Governments are powerful institutions run by bureaucrats, and the concern is about how the bureaucracies are using power. So Bernard Rosen states, “Economic and social forces impact administrators in a variety of ways, causing them to consider in a political context information that reflects the diverse conditions, attitudes, and values of a pluralistic society. It is in this political process, as individuals and groups exercise the right of access to the decision-makers with resulting adjustments and compromises, that the accountability of public administrators in a representative democracy is put to the most sophisticated tests because it is then that the definition of the ‘public interest’ is honed.”
The terms ‘administrative responsibility’ and ‘administrative accountability’ are to be distinguished from each other. Responsibility is a personal moral quality and is not related to the position of a person. However, accountability refers to specific methods and procedures to enforce the responsibility of the public servant. Responsibility is something that comes from within, but accountability works from without. Accountability is the formal, legal, and procedural basis of enforcing responsibility, as in a constitutional democratic government, mere reliance on the personal sense of duty and responsibility of public servants is not enough. Differentiating between accountability and responsibility, John M. Piffner states that responsibility is “the public servant’s responsiveness to the public good,” but accountability refers to the formal and specific location of responsibility.
According to L.D. White, “Public accountability consists of the sum total of the constitutional, statutory, administrative, and judicial rules and precedents and the established practices by means of which public officials may be held accountable for their official action.” So public accountability refers to the liability of government servants to provide a satisfactory account to the citizens of the way in which official power or discretionary authority has been used by them. Civil servants are accountable to the political executive and law courts. They enjoy a lot of powers and security of service, but their accountability for dereliction of duty, moral turpitude, financial irregularities, or corruption of any other kind can be enforced through both departmental action and judicial process.