According to public opinion polls, what most people are concerned about is the government's ability to implement policies, or, truthfully, its inability. One only needs to look at the implementation of the National Travel Card scheme to see the problems the administration has had with putting new policies in place.
The National Travel Card program was meant to encourage civil servants to travel domestically instead of overseas, in order to promote domestic tourism and help revive the economy in the wake of the 921 earthquake. It replaced the KMT govern-ment's system of subsidizing bureaucrats' holiday travel, which required those traveling to collect and submit receipts for their expenses.
However, the card scheme has spawned all sorts of irregularities. Many of the shops participating in the card scheme sell everything from jewelry to electrical appliances. It turns out that a huge number of civil servants have used their cards to pay for jewelry and appliances instead of travel. Statistics show that only 36 percent of the NT$3.1 billion subsidy for the National Travel Card plan has been used on travel-related expenditures. A well-intentioned policy has been derailed and 22 Control Yuan members have demanded an investigation.
Why have civil servants so badly abused the program? The card plan required them to spend their subsidies within specific time frames and they could not use the card in the city or county where they worked. Vacations, which should have been happy affairs, became shackled by restrictions. Who would be happy with such a vacation? Wouldn't it be better to get some useful appliances instead?
The restrictions on what businesses could participate in the card scheme have also been controver-sial. The cards are issued by partner banks, so they are actually credit cards -- the only difference being that they could only be processed on National Travel Card machines. So, does boosting tourism mean boosting the business of a few contracted shops?
Increasing the number of tourists is a goal of Premier Yu Shyi-kun's "Challenge 2008" economic plan. The intention was to increase and strengthen the nation's tourism resources and encourage civil servants to travel within the country. The card program may have been well-intentioned but is full of loopholes -- which people were quick to take advantage of. There have been complaints about the program ever since it was launched, but the government was slow to respond. Not until the Control Yuan moved to launch an investigation did the Cabinet wake up to the crisis.
The National Travel Card scheme is not a major policy, but it is an indicator of the government's sloppy decision-making, slow response and weak implementation and follow-up. The government says it is working to revive the economy, but how can people have confidence in the government's ability to devise effective stimulus programs?
How can people put their trust in the nation's civil servants, when so many bureaucrats apparently see nothing wrong with ripping off taxpayer dollars by abusing the travel card plan. Civil servants at every level should count their blessings that the government wanted to give them any money at all toward a vacation -- how many private companies subsidize their employee's holidays to the tune of NT$16,000 per year? While politicians have been quick to lambast the government for its failings as exemplified by the card scheme, have any called on errant civil servants to refund money spent on non-travel related purchases with the card?
The administration should learn a lesson from the mistakes it made in the card scheme and prepare its other programs more throughly -- obviously it can't rely on its bureaucrats to work out the details.
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