bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1990), p. 39
The following is an edited excerpt from PAFSO’s brief on the reform of the Public Service submitted in April to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts.
The popular image of the Canadian Foreign Service is that of a pampered and haughty cohort, living well-paid and insulated lives in exotic locations; the reality is somewhat different.
Canadian civil servants assigned abroad face many of the same problems that Canadians living in Canada do. However, they also face economic and social environments which compound the problems of every day life — higher crime rates, much greater levels of pollution, higher inflation rates, shortages or outright unavailability of common foodstuffs. The Foreign Service Directives are intended to compensate and ameliorate these differences, but those same directives can themselves be a problem.
The FSDs have several formal goals including “comparability”, “incentive – inducement”, and “program-related”.. Fine. However, an underlying and unstated philosophy applied in interpreting the FSDs frequently results in inconvenience for the users and greater expense for the public.
That administrative philosophy is essentially one which dictates that, irrespective of possible savings to the public, cost-effective procedures will not be authorized where there is any possibility that a civil servant may gain any advantage, either apparent or real
Until quite recently, for example, in a situation where staff or their dependants were evacuated from a post due to an emergency, it had been contrary to practice to allow those individuals to visit with family in Canada while remaining on evacuation status, i.e. on expenses. It was considered that if they were to stay with family or friends while on evacuation status, then the Department was actually subsidizing a holiday rather than responding to an emergency, and this was unacceptable.
This approach was applied despite the fact that established practice, which was evacuation to hotels in Ottawa (with fully-subsidized meals, accommodation, and incidentals) was much more expensive than the normal reimbursement rate for private accommodation’ This system was not changed until just recently, and despite the evident savings to the public, there remained for a time a wariness that this method of reducing expenditures would produce a negative reaction from Treasury Board.
There is another underlying philosophy in the Directives which is also very expensive to administer, and which is that controlling behaviour is as important as controlling expenditures.
Within the Directives, there are several benefits which staff may access if they can do so within essentially rigid guidelines. There would be no problem if the guidelines served a public purpose, however it is frequently the case that the rules are disadvantageous to the staff without being of any particular benefit to anyone.
FSD 50 Foreign Service Travel Assistance, for example, regulates the opportunities for ’assisted leave’ by the frequency of trips rather than by cost, thus disadvantaging people at posts where frequent relief is desirable. It has been a standard complaint of staff in Moscow and Beijing, for example, that conditions at post made it essential to get out of the post more than once a year. Several shorter and cheaper trips in a year could easily satisfy this need and could be funded within the FSD 50 entitlement provided, but such flexible use of the directive is not permitted.
The common response to this sort of restriction is for there to be a greater number of ’official’ trips out of posts with oppressive social climates, for consultations or conferences, medical evacuations, etc. A more economical solution would he to allow staff greater flexibility in spending the funds intended for rest and recreation purposes in the FSDs.
FSD 45 Foreign Service Leave/Option, which is intended to be an “incentive” directive, illustrates other forms of a paternalistic control of personal behaviour. FSD 45 permits foreign service personnel to exchange the 10 days of extra leave earned each year for service abroad for an economy air ticket between their post and Ottawa, either for their own use to travel out of post or for family and friends to apply to travel in to the post. The cost of one economy air ticket is the maximum extent of the employer’s financial obligations, and no further limitations should be necessary. However, this is not the case.
To illustrate, if an employee used the transportation entitlement to buy two APEX tickets for his or her parents, the degree of their “togetherness” becomes a departmental concern, as both parents must travel on the same occasion”. This term is not defined (although an example is given) and it seems pointless in that the limitations on the government’s financial obligations are clearly stated. Yet the restriction remains, where it generates grievances each year.
Another odd restriction in FSD 45 is the rule that the post must either be the “point of destination” or the “point of origin”. Where the assigned post is one to which travel is undesirable, it is not possible for an employee to use the FSD 45 to travel out to a third location and meet a friend or family member coming in from Canada, even if the combined cost of both trips was within the entitlement.
Moreover, the application of the “origin” or “destination” rule frequently leads to situations where two trips under this directive, touching on the same cities, can be treated quite differently. One set of travel costs may be fully reimbursed and the other set only partially covered, with the different treatment in these cases being dependent on the order in which the cities were visited.
Operating an auditing system capable of detecting and enforcing restrictions such as outlined above is very labour intensive and their administration is very expensive. The only realistic salvation for the system is the wholesale revision which is usually termed Simplification
’Simplification’ would replace the current system of detailed audits and disputes over undefined terms by a system where staff were provided with a budget for each purpose in the directives. The simplest illustration of the principle is a ’per diem’ system for official travel. *Pre-audited, non-accountable advances”, to use the official terminology, would create a system were individuals would have greater personal responsibility for expenditures, and where the continually increasing paper burden (and the costs of administering it) could be reduced
Simplification is a win-win’ situation for government and its servants, and we consider it to be one of the more progressive proposals for the public service in the next century.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1990), p. 39. Read the rest of this issue →
