Compulsive Auditing. UMI series #2

'Compulsive Auditing' is an illness usually associated with professional organisations/ corporate bodies. It may be linked with 'Money Worship' or forms of psychosis in which human life and pleasure are seen as worthless whilst profit and anally-retentive achievement standards are elevated to realms perceived as sacred.

Signs and symptoms.
CA may first appear in the form of prolific memos, e-mails and or cyber-conferencing. Real live face-to-face meetings are less common and, if they do occur, will be devoid of humour or common sense.
Communication will lack nuance, empathy or pleasure and become somewhat robotic. Measuring, comparing and itemising will replace any qualitative value judgements and tick boxes will proliferate.
As the illness develops, sufferers will become convinced that measuring things really does make them grow and will develop a paranoid outlook in which competitors constantly lurk waiting to eclipse their performance targets and thus remove their right to live.

Cure.
Unfortunately, rather than seek help, most sufferers will cluster together in 'focus groups' in which their symptoms worsen. They will become gripped by the need to invent more and more delusions believing that false and fractured goals actually improve their functionality. Indeed, many sufferers will rise in status occupying positions of power within their organisations which then, of course, become rife with the collective strain of the disease.
It is hard to intervene once the illness has taken over and is usually best to withdraw from the group and wait until it burns itself out thru in-fighting, splinter groups, breakdown, financial collapse or, occasionally, suicide.


N.B. Tho known as Compulsive Auditing. CA appears in various forms beyond actual auditing. i.e. 'Performance Evaluation', 'Target Setting', 'Efficiency Improvement Measures' and other seemingly helpful strategies can become carriers of the pseudo-improvement virus and thus lead to all the destructive symptoms of CA.

In it's advanced forms and, often, in cases of creative individuals, CA may lead to delusional psychosis. e.g. 'Blue Sky Thinking', 'Unlimited Personal Gain' and, even 'The Big Society'.