Civil servants can’t save, cut their budget
They are spendthrifts. The annual audit report has given us sufficient indication of this.
TK Chua, FMT letter
I refer to the Prime Minister’s call for a new approach in spending – asking government departments and agencies to exercise thrift and be rewarded when there are savings from unfinished allocations by the end of the year.
The current practice is for all ministries and agencies to finish their annual allocations. By doing that, they are deemed “efficient”.
I do not know since when spending money has become an indicator of efficiency.
I am surprised that it takes the Prime Minister and Finance Minister so long to realise that spending money can’t really be a KPI of efficiency. Perhaps the toll of 1MDB has finally made the government wake up from its slumber.
So the Prime Minister and Finance Minister has proposed that government departments and agencies must now exercise thrift to keep some of the allocations as unspent money. The savings can then be used for other programmes or for the benefit of the officers concerned.
To me this is another half-baked proposal that will give rise to unintended consequences again.
First, government servants are not known to be thrifty. On the contrary, they are spendthrifts. The annual audit report has given us sufficient indication of this.
Second, if indeed there is leftover from the allocation, it is not because of prudence or thrift among government servants. On the contrary, it is an indication of over budgeting i.e. the Treasury has been too generous or too incompetent to provide the right allocations to ministries and agencies.
A more effective approach is to adhere to budgeting process more stringently, rather than to provide generous allocations and then ask the departments and agencies to save part of the allocations.
