Public accountability is critical to a democracy. But as government becomes ever more complex, with bureaucracy growing ever deeper and wider, how can these multiplying numbers of unelected bureaucrats be held accountable The answer, more often than not, comes in the form of inspectors general, monitors largely independent of the management of the agencies to which they are attached. How, and whether, this system works in America is what Nadia Hilliard investigates in iThe Accountability State.i Exploring the significance of our current collective obsession with accountability, her book helpfully shifts the issue from the technical domain of public administration to the context of American political development. pInspectors general, though longtime fixtures of government and the military, first came into prominence in the United States in the 1970s in the wake of evidence of wrongdoing in the Nixon administration. Their number and importance has only increased in tandem with concerns a