The Evaluation of Public Services As an Instrument of Accountability. the Case of Ibge.

New ways of information diffusion are creating new ways of social participation. Societies require today transparent and efficient accountability processes from the public administration. The internal governance procedures of each government body must be increasingly efficient and transparent.

Official Statistics Institutes are central institutions in this new scenario. The information they produce reveals the social and economic reality of each nation and therefore becomes increasingly relevant to a grounded analysis of public administration performance. IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) is Brazil´s official statistics institute and has the difficult task of maintaining its credibility in a scenario of social outbreak caused by constant corruption scandals that undermine the population's confidence in public institutions. IBGE has so far managed to maintain its good technical reputation and is able to position itself as one of the most respected official statistics institutions in the world. However, in terms of governance and management transparency, the Institute is still taking its first steps and needs new administrative standards and evaluation processes in order to respond the new demands of society in this area.

This paper describes an initiative of the Institute to create new evaluation procedures in order to improve its accountability capacity. A pilot study in IBGE seeks to develop an internal evaluation model that combines quantitative and qualitative techniques to verify the Institute's performance in terms of relavance, effectiveness and efficiency. The project combines the quantitative techniques of the DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) with the qualitative ones of the EVAM Model (Evaluation, Learning and Improvement) to develop an internal evaluation model that helps the institute to properly address the social demands of better internal governance and greater managerial transparency.