Making Public Service Work For Everyone

Friday, 01 July 2011 01:47

Written by Aaron Benedict De Leon

We have tired and labored the past few years trying to put people behind bars, because of graft and corruption, because of malversation of public funds and questionable assets and wealth. We have consumed all our energies, exhausted all possible means, police wise and media wise, to pressure culprits to come out and surrender themselves to the law. We have done this over and over again, yet the cycle just continues to go on and on, just as I’m talking right now.

The youth sector never gets tired, and will not stop in its willingness to fight this social ill, but there will come a time too, that the youth will become part of the older generation, will inherit the same system, will be prone to succumb to the same system and will soon be part of what they hated years back. This is bound to happen unless we break the chain of inheritance.

What had been the problem in many pursuits?

How do you arrive at x + y = z, if you do not know the underlying factors that comprise x and y? Moreover, what if x or y is only a by-product of another equation?

What am I trying to arrive at? We seem to focus too much on prosecution that we don’t realize that there are several institutional frailties which may have influenced that behavior. We want justice, but only on a reactionary basis to deter bad behavior, without taking into account the system that breeds and feeds that behavior.

For example, how would you be able to prevent a government official, at the rank and file level, from honest service, if he/she earns a measly P12000 monthly salary, subject to government taxation?

Often, these are people who serve tens and hundreds of thousands of clients a day, but receive no monuments from our national government, despite their honest service. What makes it worse is, do we have an incentive structure for performing government employees?

From day one, I’ve always harped on the idea that we must invest figuratively and literally in the government resource talent pool we have in the country, because this is a big reflection of our bureaucracy, and a factor being looked at by foreign investors and creditors.

I do not subscribe to the idea that public service should beholden its employees to receive small remuneration, because by nature, it is not a business.

Yes, it is not a business, and the core is to serve people. But at what cost does it do our business climate if we have good government employees transferring to multi-national companies, because of the government’s incompetence to provide them competitive wages.

It will cost us marginal total productivity between a good and a bad worker, and overall, the behavioral outlook of government employees has and will continue to become distorted, because they are being taken for granted as resources for effective public service.

By virtue of this, we would have created a huge imbalance between the economic structure of the country, a situation where the government is no longer capable of holding up its wage structure and career development structure versus what private businesses can offer. And how does this impact us? We may have the best talent in the private sector, but no business would like to engage in our country because we have poor public employees.

The result would be stagnation of the business climate, where there are too few jobs for too many talented and skilled people applying for corporate positions. Where as, if there is a competitive structure for development, financially and career-wise, for our government employees, then we will see equilibrium of talent between the public and private sectors.

And then, the DBM would mention that we have a relatively high government expenditure level. Of course, when you have a relatively bloated bureaucracy where agencies duplicate functions, and task force bureaus are created for nothing.

I’ve always believed that the core agencies can hold the capacity of performing extensive functions of the President, provided that their Organizational Structure is reviewed and re-assessed.

In companies, for example, the matrices of job descriptions of each department are complex, but the blueprint has a certain direction focused on the unit’s goals. Government departments can also apply an integrated matrix focus approach, to allow greater flexibility amongst sub-agencies belonging under its wing.

For example, the TESDA should be subsumed under the CHED, since the focus of TESDA focuses on technical and vocational education under the tertiary level of schooling. The CHED, meanwhile, should be sub-agency under the regulation of the Department of Education, who has the direct mandate in educational affairs.

This makes bureaucracy more streamlined, more accountable, but more flexible to responding to the requirements of the service.

This will also be the perfect time to dissolve irrelevant agencies and task force commissions whose purpose has already elapsed.

In the long run, what we aim to do, although it will require tremendous political will, is to remove elective posts that only duplicate and serve as spare tire functions to those positions primarily tasked to perform those duties.

At the end of the day, the success of any anti-corruption or reform measure is to make people accountable and perform stop gap institutionalization efforts to effectively govern the ethical and moral behavior of our public officials.

It does not only involve the punitive power of the law, but also the ability of the institution to dispense of rewards and incentives for positive behavior.

The captivity and inclusiveness of our solution formula, and not our single dimensional focus, will help us finally put a stop to the rampant cycle of dishonest governance in the country.

The youth has the capacity to not only pressure the government to dispense of justice against those who have wronged our institutions in public service, but also to advocate for necessary institutional reforms, which includes providing a “carrot and stick” mechanism, in rewarding good behavior and deterring negative conduct of service.