Customer Satisfaction Survey: Misleading as Advertised?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 24, 2000 | by Sean Paige

Here's an item that The Great Reinventor, Vice President Al Gore, is sure to seize on in building the case that his six-year makeover of the federal government, called the National Performance Review, is taking hold. In a recent survey conducted by the University of Michigan (but paid for by the federal agencies being evaluated, which should raise suspicions), 29 "high-impact" federal agencies scored nearly as well as private-sector companies in the level of customer satisfaction they enjoy. The government's overall service rating was 68.6, the survey found, just a smidgen below the private sector's rating of 72.

The survey results surprise not only because they run counter to waste & abuse's preoccupations but because they fly in the face of other studies, such as one last year by the Pew Research Center that showed overwhelming public distrust of government and doubts about the way it is managed.

So how to account for the sudden turnaround? Most of the "customers" that the university surveyed, it turns out, were program beneficiaries. This fact helps explain the glowing ratings, since one thing the government does well, even by this column's account, is shovel the money out -- usually with reckless abandon. Beneficiaries of the Food and Nutrition Service, for instance, rated as excellent the government's ability to put food on their tables, as did those who were receiving educational benefits through the Head Start program. Less well rated, however, were those lovable cutups at the IRS, probably because their imperative is to take rather than to give, as well as the merry band of meddlers at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA.

Also surveyed as "customers" were visitors to national parks, reference librarians who use an Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, Website and teachers who participate in educational programs at one NASA facility -- none of which likely will have much of an ax to grind. And other "customers" somehow were overlooked by surveyors: the small-business woman in the crosshairs of EPA regulators or straggling to comply with OSHA's new ergonomic standards, and the lumberman banned from logging by the U.S. Forest Service.

Nor were the taxpaying "shareholders" surveyed about what they think about the efficiency of the federal enterprise and whose judgment might be affected by the following track record: at least $1 billion in annual food-stamp overpayments by the Department of Agriculture; $11 billion in unneeded equipment being stored in military storage depots; $3 billion in equipment lost in transit by the Navy; $4.5 billion in overpayments made to defense contractors but never detected by the Pentagon; $109 million in overpayments on Pell student grants; $10 billion spent by the Department of Energy from 1980 to 1996 for 31 computer-system acquisition projects that never were completed; $12.6 billion in Medicare overpayments in 1998; $857 million in erroneous rent-subsidy payments made in 1998 by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; $3.3 billion in erroneous Supplemental Security Income payments in 1998; and $1 billion spent by the Department of Labor's Job Corps program from 1995 to 1997, though more than three-quarters of program graduates were fired, laid off or quit within 100 days of being placed in a job.