Statistics and the Efficiency of Government Employee Work: Between the Procrustean Bed of KPIs and Public Welfare Evaluating the efficiency of government employees through statistical indicators is one of the most complex tasks in public administration. Unlike the commercial sector, where the key criterion is profit, in a government institution, efficiency is associated with achieving public welfare, social justice, and the enforcement of laws, which is difficult to quantify. Key Measurement Paradigms: From Bureaucratic to New Public Classical bureaucratic model (M. Weber). Efficiency is measured through compliance with procedures and rules. Statistics here are accounting for processed documents, adherence to deadlines, and the absence of violations. Critics call this the "ritual activity syndrome": the process is more important than the result. Example: the success of a passport officer is measured not by citizen satisfaction, but by the number of passports issued and zero percent of errors in documents, which can be achieved by increasing the time of verification and queues. New Public Management (NPM) model. Since the 1980s, market mechanisms have been introduced into public administration: KPIs (key performance indicators), state assignments, performance-based budgeting. Here, statistics focus on results (outcomes) rather than processes (outputs). For example, the efficiency of the employment service is assessed not by the number of registered unemployed, but by the percentage of those employed. Paradoxical example from the UK (NPM era): The police, for which KPIs on solving minor thefts were introduced, began to register them as "loss of property" (which was not included in the reporting), in order to artificially increase the percentage of solved crimes in the remaining recorded offenses. This is a classic case of "goal displacement" when an employee optimizes behavior under a metric, not under the real goal. Basic Classes of Statistical Indicators and Their T ... Read more