Whenever managers pay attention to output numbers (alone) people are more likely to lie (or falsify their output or quality reports). Why do they do this? The reason is simple. The only way to avoid grief is to feed the wrong information to management! Nobody likes trouble.

An alternative response is to 'distort' the system - bring things forward or back in the accounts, spend money now, hold over spend until the next period and so on. Such distortions usually incur a cost to the system. Looked at this way, it is better for people to lie than distort the system.

People don't behave in this way because they are bad or want to be difficult, they behave this way because they are being treated as part of the problem instead of part of the solution. People who do the work have good ideas about what quality means and can be helped with their ideas about how to measure and improve it. It is the manager's role to join with people in solving the problem of what measurement to use, they should also adopt an attitude of testing measurement rather than 'testing' people.