Mon, Dec 14, 2009 page8

• EDITORIAL : Wu ‘blows his top’ at inefficiency

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  At a Cabinet meeting this week, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) expressed dissatisfaction with administrative inefficiency. If high-level officials must blow their top before civil servants start doing what they’re told, he said, why doesn’t he simply create a “blowing my top” chop to use? The deteriorating efficiency of Taiwan’s government institutions has been lamented throughout the country, and it has been a millstone around the neck of Taiwanese competitiveness for years.

  When a top official loses his or her temper, the matter at hand is often handled with a sudden newfound dispatch, but once it blows over, bureaucrats fall back into their old ways. This is a vicious circle that cripples Taiwanese officialdom, and Wu is hallucinating if he thinks blowing his top is the best way to insure administrative promptness. The more often top officials lose their temper, the more likely it is that the bureaucracy will become fatigued and in the end do nothing unless some official vents his anger. In the end, not even that will help.

  Creating a “blowing my top” chop and simply losing ones temper is not going to improve things. Instead, the government must find a way to make systemic improvements and design a mechanism for handling official documents that will minimize bureaucratic indolence and inefficiency. If official business has not been attended to within a set deadline, red flags should be set off in the system and a list of names be immediately sent to the manager at the same time as an alert goes off to the case handler. If the premier can handle an issue before the day is over, then why should that be beyond the capabilities of a civil servant?

  And if Wu thinks bureaucrats procrastinate because they are lazy, he is sorely mistaken. More often than not, it is a matter of avarice rather than laziness. We should not for a second imagine that low-level civil servants lack power. Unethical bureaucrats stall official documents to wield their power and force members of the public to pay them off. There is a close connection between laziness and greed, and if laziness can be eliminated, most of the problems caused by avarice will also be taken care of.

  Civil servants have to change their attitudes. They have never made it their top priority to serve the public. Instead, they see the public as crooks trying to find legal loopholes to benefit their own interests, and that is also why administrative legislation and punishments are based on preventing corruption. In the process, they will hold fast and inflexibly to the law to protect themselves — if there is even the most minuscule difference between your situation and what the law prescribes, you might as well forget about passing a review or obtaining a permit.

  The government also must change its attitude. Inflexibility among civil servants may be a problem, but as soon as their discretionary powers are expanded, accusations of influence peddling and graft will appear as low-level civil servants see their chance. Civil servants are there to serve the general public, and the government must establish a set of ethical rules and legislation that discourages these ills so we can improve administrative efficiency.

  In the end, being a civil servant means having an iron rice bowl. Once someone has passed the civil service exam, they have a job for life, regardless of ability and performance. In addition, the performance evaluation system does not provide enough incentive to make them work harder and improve efficiency. Without major reform of the personnel system for civil servants, no number of “blowing my top” chops will improve the situation.
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