The government will make a decision on whether to give civil servants a pay raise and by how much later this week, Cabinet spokesman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) said yesterday.
Chiang made the statement in reply to reporters’ questions over the pay raise suggested by Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) last week as a way of prodding private firms into making similar moves. The government had halted pay raises for six years.
Echoing Chiang, Central Personnel Administration Minister Wu Tai-cheng (吳泰成) said the raise could be 3 percent, as academics and experts have recommended.
Any potential pay increase would come from the budget surplus, as well as earnings from state-run enterprises and dividends from the government’s private sector investments, Wu Tai-cheng said.
The Cabinet is scheduled to discuss the pay raise on Thursday. The plan has to gain approval from the legislature before taking effect on July 1, Wu Tai-cheng said.
Rising energy and commodity prices have eroded civil servants’ disposable incomes, lending support to a pay raise, Wu Tai-cheng said.
Salaried workers in the private sector face growing financial constraints and firms may increase wages once the government fires the first shot, Wu Tai-cheng said, adding that a pay raise could also help stimulate the economy.
Shih Su-mei (石素梅), minister of the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, said the agency could put forward a supplementary budget proposal before the end of this month if the Cabinet gives the green light.
The extra spending would not cause unbearable burdens on the Treasury or crowd out social welfare expenditures, Shih said.
“It would not be the first time the government proposes an additional budget to fund a personnel expense increase,” she told the legislature’s Finance Committee after some lawmakers questioned the budget’s legality.
Deputy Minister of Finance Chang Sheng-ford (張盛和) said there was no need to issue new government bonds to fund the pay raise.
The pay raise has raised concern over increasing government debt burdens. The Alliance for Fair Tax Reform (公平稅改聯盟) last week said the nation’s debt actually amounted to NT$919,000 (US$31,365) per person as of the end of last month, not NT$209,000 as the ministry has published.
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