External evaluator

From EvaluationWiki

In program evaluation, an evaluator who is not on the payroll or in the employ of the program; the intent is to ensure that their opinion is independent of the company's future welfare and hence somewhat more objective than it would be otherwise. However, they are often employed by an agency that funds the program, which makes them less than ideally external, since they usually know that their employer wants to hear good news rather than bad about the program being evaluated. In the business world, many auditors-the fiscal equivalent of the external evaluator-turned out to be employed by a company that was providing management advice to the company whose books they were auditing. That consulting arm of their own employer was a place in which many of them hoped to find their own career future. This led to extremely favorable treatment to a degree that involved bending the law, and massively misleading investors. External evaluators in other applied fields of evaluation, such as product evaluation, have analogous relationships to manufacturers; for example, they might be employed by a consumers' organization or the publisher of a consumer interest magazine. The contrast is with internal evaluators. See Conflict of Interest.