Resistance to Accounting for Outcomes: A Case Study of the Egyptian Sales Tax Department

Recent years have witnessed the growth of monitoring and evaluation activities in the work of supranational organisations and, therefore, the globalisation of the concept of the audit society. This paper examines a failed attempt by the World Bank to institutionalise an alternative monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system to account for outcomes as a condition of funding in an Egyptian case study. It questions the claims of the Wold Bank about the cause of the failure of the new M&E system to understand the reasons for resistance to accounting for outcomes. Longitudinal case study data were collected from interviews, observations, discussions and documentary analysis, and from publicly available reports and other media issued by the World Bank. The official explanation for the failure to implement outcomes based budgeting in Egypt was obstruction by middle managers. The findings of this study provide an alternative explanation to that published by the World Bank for the failure to institutionalise outcomes based budgeting in Egypt over the last decade. It was found that the middle managers were the real supporters of performance-based budgeting (PBB). Other parties and existing laws and regulations contributed to the failure of the PBB project. In the absence of the direct involvement of international experts, the World Bank local consultants authorised the reproduction of existing budgeting rules and routines. The Budget Law and the Ministry of Finance acted as an obstacle and legitimated the use of PBB as a complementary tool. The IT developers spent the World Bank’s funds on automating the accounting systems that support the institutionalised line item budgeting. The resignation of key champions who initiated and supported the implementation of PBB resulted in the official termination of the new budgeting system. This case and similar cases may enhance our understanding of how and when monitoring and evaluation technologies should be introduced at the global level, in order to manage conflicts of interest between agencies and beneficiaries.