Abstract
Effectively produced governmental reports serve an invaluable public function. These documents provide legislative and municipal leaders, policy entrepreneurs, program administrators and the general public with a means of measuring governmental accountability and making informed policy decisions. Unfortunately, more often than not governmental reports are narrow and fragmented, can be ripe with inaccuracy and incomplete information. In certain cases they provide very little insight into the health and effectiveness of a public program or agency. This thesis seeks to better understand how limited and inefficient means of public reporting can be evaluated and compared to other reporting models. I focus on the California Association of County Veteran Services Officers’ Annual Report as a baseline case study for incomplete reporting practices, and use a process called Criteria Alternative Matrix Analysis to compare this reporting model with three very different reports generated by organizations with similar missions and service functions. Using this matrix, I score each alternative against key criteria identified by academic literature on the subject. My aim is to reveal ways in which each model may or may not comply with major theoretical principals identified in effective reporting and evaluation theory. In comparing the baseline report to three different reports, I seek to not only find ways to promote more informed decision-making on the part of legislators and administrators alike, but also to identify in general terms ways in which any governmental report might be compared to similar models in an effort to identify strengths and weaknesses in the authors’ reporting methods. Finally, I assert that principals for comparison, evaluation and expanding reporting practices found in this thesis are important for improving public reporting in general.