Promised “performance pay” for Taipei City government workers will not be implemented, with the city instead introducing a new evaluation system for departments, Research, Development and Evaluation Commission Chairman Chen Ming-shiun (陳銘薰) said yesterday.
While Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) had called for top-performing city bureaucrats to be rewarded using new “performance bonuses,” implementation of such a scheme would be overly complicated, as well as potentially unfair to employees if quantitative measures alone were used, Chen said.
Ko had called for the city to conduct individual performance appraisals using techniques borrowed from the corporate world.
Seventy-five percent of city employees are awarded additional end-of-year bonuses based on simple supervisor appraisals, matching the upper limit mandated by national law, Department of Personnel Deputy Director Chang Chien-chih (張建智) said.
Chen said that in lieu of new individual performance bonuses, the mayor’s office would assume greater control over the apportionment of normal year-end bonuses to collectively reward workers in top-performing departments.
While in the past the mayor’s office was only empowered to take away 1 percentage point of a department’s 75 percentage points worth of bonuses and transfer the amount to other departments, in the future it will take as many as 5 percentage points away from poorly performing departments, he said.
Chen said that departments’ performances would be determined based on calculations using scorecards borrowed from the corporate world, based mainly on the satisfaction of city residents and the reduction of waste and red tape.
Twenty-five percent of the score is to be determined based on sets of 25 “plus” and 20 “minus” factors, such as encouraging civic participation and employee publications.
Labor unions and business associations are to assign grades to the commissioners of the Department of Labor and Department of Economic Development.
Ko said that the new system would be piloted next month, with full implementation starting next year.
The manufacture of the remaining 28 M1A2T Abrams tanks Taiwan purchased from the US has recently been completed, and they are expected to be delivered within the next one to two months, a source said yesterday. The Ministry of National Defense is arranging cargo ships to transport the tanks to Taiwan as soon as possible, said the source, who is familiar with the matter. The estimated arrival time ranges from late this month to early next month, the source said. The 28 Abrams tanks make up the third and final batch of a total of 108 tanks, valued at about NT$40.5 billion
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