Civil service faces major shake-up

With the performance of government bureaucrats coming under severe criticism recently, Chu Wu-hsien (朱武獻), director-general of the Central Personnel Administration, yesterday said his office is currently working on a program intended to improve the civil service system, which could be finished by June at the earliest.

Chu made the remark while attending a meeting of the legislature's Organic Laws and Statutes Committee.

Chu said that the performance of a small minority of civil servants was indeed unsatisfactory, and singled out "lack of initiative" as the main problem.

"Most of the total of 600,000 civil servants are positive about their job, but there is still a small number who are recalcitrant," Chu said. "As the civil service requires efficiency, bureaucrats who fail to meet the requirements should find new jobs."

Chu said the largest problem with the current civil service system was its lack of an efficient method of weeding out unqualified bureaucrats, and that his office would present to the Executive Yuan and Examination Yuan a report on ways to resolve the problem by the middle of the year.

The issue was recently raised in a routine meeting of a nine-member panel headed by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) on Tuesday, during which some high-ranking bureaucrats -- at the vice-ministerial level -- were blamed for failing to cooperate properly with the politically appointed ministers. Some panel members suggested that these bureaucrats be removed from their positions, saying that the problem had severely affected the government's administrative efficiency.

This criticism, however, has been said by opposition lawmakers to be an excuse by the DPP to evade its share of responsibility for the government's inefficiency. They have said that the Chen administration's "incompetent leadership" is in fact the real problem.

"The DPP is trying to make an excuse to conduct a comprehensive shake-up [to remove non-DPP bureaucrats] by blaming the bureaucrats' refusal to cooperate for all the policy failures of the past year," KMT Legislator Liu Kuang-hua (劉光華) said.

Hsieh Chi-ta (謝啟大), convener of the New Party caucus in the legislature, criticized the DPP for "making a big mistake" by allowing many of its talented people to leave their original positions in the administrative branch to run in the year-end legislative elections.

"The DPP has a distrust of the bureaucrats, and its own people don't want to fill the politically appointed positions. Who on earth is going to govern the nation now?" Hsieh said.

In its defense, the DPP said that it was routine for bureaucrats to change jobs and it did not merit a big fuss.

"Only bureaucrats who have done something wrong have anything to worry about. As a matter of fact, some bureaucrats have recently caused a lot of trouble and have performed badly," Chou Po-lun (周伯倫), convener of the DPP caucus in the legislature, said.

At Tuesday's panel meeting, the recent accident at the Third Nuclear Power Plant (核三) was reportedly cited as an example of bureaucrats neglecting their duties.

They said that officials at the Taiwan Power Company (台電) and the Atomic Energy Council (原能會) should take responsibility for a fire that broke out at the plant on March 18 and left two electricity generators out of commission.