Draft amendments to the Civil Servants Evaluation Act (公務人員考績法) have been a hot topic of discussion over the past few days. The Examination Yuan proposed that at least 3 percent of staff at government agencies should receive a “C” grade in year-end evaluations and that those who receive such a grade three times during their career be dismissed.
This would strengthen the control exerted by political appointees over civil servants. One might therefore expect such appointees to be strong supporters of the proposed reform. In fact, government officials from the premier to the mayor and deputy mayor of Taipei have publicly declared that they do not want this new management tool. So what is going on here?
In a democracy, the ultimate bosses are ordinary citizens, who delegate power to politicians through elections. This is the first level of delegation, but officials are largely unable to achieve anything on their own. They need help from a professional civil service and this gives rise to a second level of delegation.
Unfortunately, conflicts of interest between the “bosses” and those who work for them stop this delegation from functioning as efficiently as it should. For example, political appointees, with an eye to getting re-elected, may govern in a way that betrays their purported masters — the general public. Taiwan’s ubiquitous “mosquito halls” — public buildings that are hardly used — are a fine example of the failure of delegation at the first level.
Beyond that, the inflexibility and overriding concern for self-preservation of career civil servants, who frequently finesse their instructions to listen and respond to the public, as portrayed in the film No Puedo Vivir sin Ti, demonstrate the delegation failing at the second level.
Last year, the government promulgated the Civil Service Administrative Neutrality Act (公務人員行政中立法). This law incorporates reforms aimed at correcting failures at the first level of delegation by giving civil servants room to work independently and without political interference.
The amendments to the Civil Servants Evaluation Act now being proposed by the Examination Yuan, on the other hand, mainly aim at rectifying failures at the second level of delegation by encouraging civil servants to devote themselves to public service. So why should political appointees be against it? As I see it, there are three possible reasons.
First, in democratic governments, political appointees regularly come and go over time, whereas civil servants sometimes enjoy lifelong employment. Eventually, this creates an organizational culture whose influence outweighs that of appointees. To ensure the smooth promotion of government policy, newly appointed political officials often arrive at a tacit understanding with their departments. Thus they tolerate unwritten rules such as the one that states new recruits, women who get pregnant and give birth and those who take time off to study will get no better than a “B” grade, instead of being evaluated according to objective criteria, and this can go on for years without upsetting either side.
If the reforms now being proposed by the Examination Yuan are going to remodel established ways of evaluating civil servants’ performance, political appointees are naturally concerned that this could lead to an unraveling of their unspoken agreements. They are also very much aware that civil servants have sufficient “soft power” to mount silent resistance and make their jobs very difficult.
Secondly, political appointees, under pressure to come up with tangible policy achievements, have little motivation to concern themselves with internal management and are therefore inclined to leave related issues like evaluation in the hands of career administrators. The Examination Yuan’s proposed reforms would upset the applecart by encouraging these career administrators, newly concerned about their own job security, to pass the buck upwards. As a result, appointees would be forced to devote much more time to internal management, all of which would clearly hamper their ability to strive for visible political achievements.
The last and most disagreeable point is that unspoken agreements between political appointees and career civil servants effectively constitute a kind of collusion — and this takes two forms.
The first is where, in the course of their work, political appointees make a trade-off in performance management, indulging failures at the second level of delegation in exchange for civil servants’ help in accumulating political achievements of the “mosquito hall” variety, even if it means sacrificing the country’s long-term interests.
The second kind of collusion concerns votes, because civil servants are also voters. If civil servants start making veiled threats, such as asking whether the pan-blues get too many votes, these veiled threats could have the effect of obstructing the Examination Yuan’s proposed reforms.
Politically appointed officials are willing to indulge the failure of delegation at the second level in exchange for retaining the votes of a minority of hard-core loyalist supporters. Ultimately, it is the tax-paying public that ends up footing the bill for the results of this electoral collusion.
At this key time for civil service evaluation reform, political appointees at all levels of government must overcome their fear of change. They should do their duty as politically appointed leaders by recognizing the urgent need for the systematic reform of Taiwan’s civil service and fulfilling their mission, namely the realization of long-lasting improvements in democratic governance.
More important still, political appointees need to pledge that, if the proposed amendments to the Civil Servants Evaluation Act are passed, they will commit sufficient organizational and personal resources to building a performance management structure suited to each public department from the bottom up.
As such, the newly amended Civil Servants Evaluation Act should also include measures to transform the Civil Service Protection and Training Commission into more of a quasi-judicial institution, relax restrictions on the establishment of civil servants’ associations, make performance evaluation boards open to public scrutiny and empower specific agencies to decide evaluation issues, along with other ancillary measures needed for the effective implementation of these reforms.
The controversy over civil service evaluation reform is being played out in public. Paradoxically, only by not placing their prospects of winning elections in 2012 before all other considerations can officials best ensure their success in those elections.
Chen Don-yun is an associate professor in the Department of Public Administration at National Chengchi University and a standing board member of Transparency International Chinese Taipei.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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