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Over the past two years a number of governments have created, or announced an intention to create, a unit whose job is to examine public spending and ask a question that sounds obvious and is rarely asked systematically: what is this money actually buying, and would we spend it this way if we were starting today.

The best known of these is American, and the acronym it produced has since been borrowed elsewhere. Japanese government communications have referred to a domestic equivalent, in the context of reviewing tax measures and subsidies, concentrating existing expenditure rather than layering new spending on top of it, and strengthening the verification of whether policies achieve their stated effect. The framing there is notably narrower than the American one, and closer to what treasuries have traditionally called expenditure review.

The label is doing a lot of work in these discussions, and not always helpfully. It is worth separating three quite different things that get bundled under it.

The first is headcount reduction: fewer public servants, fewer agencies. This is the version that attracts most attention and produces the fastest visible numbers. It is also the version most likely to cut capacity the state will need later, because the posts easiest to remove are frequently the ones nobody is currently shouting about.

The second is procurement and subsidy review: examining what the state buys, from whom, at what price, and whether a subsidy created for a reason that has since disappeared is still being paid. This is unglamorous, slow, and where most of the recoverable money usually sits.

The third is effect verification: establishing whether a programme does what it was set up to do. This is the hardest of the three, because it requires knowing what the programme was meant to achieve, having measured the starting position, and being willing to publish a result that embarrasses somebody.

A government that says it is pursuing efficiency and means only the first has not really started. A government that means the second and third is doing something difficult that will take years and produce few announceable moments.

What would such a body face in Lesotho specifically?

It would face a revenue base it does not control. A large share of receipts arrives from outside the country and moves for reasons decided elsewhere. That changes the nature of the exercise: efficiency in a country with volatile external revenue is less about trimming a stable budget than about knowing which commitments can survive a bad year and which cannot. A review that produces a list of savings without saying which spending is protected has answered the easier question.

It would face a thin evidence base. Effect verification requires data that was collected before a programme began, using a definition that has not changed since. That is expensive to build and produces nothing in its first years, which makes it the first thing cut whenever budgets tighten, which is precisely when the evidence would have been most useful.

It would face the problem that the largest inefficiencies are frequently not financial. A clinic that is staffed but has no medicine, a road maintained on paper, a document that takes four months to issue: none of these appear as waste in a ledger. The money was spent as budgeted. The failure is in delivery, and a unit that only reads budgets will not find it.

And it would face the oldest difficulty in this field, which is that a body reviewing spending is reviewing decisions colleagues made. Its findings are only worth having if it can publish something unwelcome, and it can only do that if its independence is established before it produces its first difficult report rather than negotiated afterwards.

None of this is an argument against the idea. The questions are good ones and most states answer them badly. It is an argument for being specific about which of the three things is meant, and for judging any such body on whether it publishes what it finds rather than on whether it is created.

If a body of this kind is ever established here, this site will publish what it produces, including the parts that do not flatter anyone.