Not a bad concept. But your accountabil-a-buddy has to be at the same level as you technically. One can easily fool or mislead non-technical people. "Q: What are you doing?" "A: Rebooting the flux capacitor"
I've worked (in non-government contexts) under rules that required two people for certain actions.
My experiences with such processes is that unless you can have some sort of technical measure that proves both people are actually paying active attention to what is being done, the second person will often just zone out. Sometimes, if asked even a few hours later, they won't even have a clear recollection of the event taking place, much less what was actually done.
Additionally if you both double up and cut the workforce, chances are the two will be doubling up in another way too, i.e. both working on different tasks and claiming to keep an eye on eachother.
But really, you are going to lay off 90% of the sysadmins and require two different people involved to change a password?
What this shows is if anything how much you need a combination of good monitoring and enough people. And once one account is compromised you have a chance for the sysadmin to be using sock puppets for accountability actions.
Here is an example placard from a Titan II site:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/4182509642/
(By Matt Blaze)
Not a bad concept. But your accountabil-a-buddy has to be at the same level as you technically. One can easily fool or mislead non-technical people. "Q: What are you doing?" "A: Rebooting the flux capacitor"