One of the achievements for which Mayor Giuliani is famous is the Compstat system that used statistics to fight crime more successfully. Mayor Bloomberg has built on this achievement with a mayor’s management report that is full of statistics that can be used to measure the quality of city government and the performance of the city – everything from Fire Department response time to the infant mortality rate in the city.

Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office – the Washington-based investigative arm of Congress that used to be known as the General Accounting Office – issued a report illuminating the possibilities for a kind of national Compstat that goes beyond crime, what it calls “an independent, web-based comprehensive key national indicator system with the nation’s best quality data that would allow the public, the media, policymakers, government, and non-government institutions to better understand and assess the position and progress of the United States, both on an absolute basis as well as compared to other nations. Such a system would cover traditional areas of American life and public debate such as the economy, society and culture, and the environment.”

It’s easy to see how this could be slanted, but it’s also easy to see how it could be useful. The GAO report cites as a local example New York City’s “Annual Report on Social Indicators.” Curious about this report, we checked into it and found that the last such report was for 2002. A spokeswoman for the city planning department said the report covering 2003 is expected next month, six months late. It’s been an extraordinarily busy and productive year at the city planning department. But as these measures, both locally and nationally, are refined and moved onto the Internet, one thing to strive for is timeliness. If a corporation issued its annual report six months late, shareholders would get nervous.