Legal And Bureaucratic Accountability Of The Army Corps Of...

While the catastrophic failure of the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina can be attributed to the Army Corps of Engineers (â€Å"Corps†), the Corps’ failures can be attributed to fundamental flaws within the accountability environments they were operating in during both the building and the maintenance of the levees. Legal and bureaucratic accountability were the primary and secondary accountability approaches at work, with legal accountability most notable during their planning and construction process, and bureaucratic accountability taking precedence during their oversight process. Ironically, while these are the forms of accountability that should contain the highest degrees of control, critical failures resulting from each of these accountability environments led to the Corps, in practice, having an extremely low degree of control and ultimately led to the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina . As defined by Romzek and Dubnick, legal accountability is based on the relationship between an agency and an external party that controls the agency’s actions using legal or contractual orders. In 1965, as part of the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Louisiana Hurricane Protection Project (â€Å"Project†), Congress authorized the Corps to build a system of levees to protect New Orleans from hurricane damage. With this authorization and the federal government paying 70 percent of the costs, the Corps was legally accountable to Congress and dependent on them for bothShow MoreRelatedThe Classical Theory of Organisation and Its Relevance4143 Words   |  17 Pagesprocess, defined tasks, defined accountability, and formalized procedures and practices to avoid any conflict in their relationship. 2. Workers have been treated as economic man who can be motivated by means of money only. International Research Journal of Finance and Economics - Issue 41 (2010) 61 3. 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