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Public sector performance measurement may be affected by data manipulation. This study empirically explores strategies of data manipulation used by civil servants at the regional level in Russia. Twenty-five civil servants from three regional governments were interviewed. Two strategies were identified: ‘prudent’ bureaucrats kept a low profile by reporting ‘more-normal-than-real’ figures; ‘reckless’ bureaucrats aimed at inflating figures to maximize credit. Systematic application of these strategies produced a detectable bias in the overall performance data which were estimated using a nation-wide performance data set covering the period 2007–2011 (with a unified list of over 300 indicators from 83 regional governments).
Alexander Kalgin (2014) studied this question.