Salary, Allowances of Civil Servants: Allocation rising, service quality not
With every passing year, the share of the budget going towards civil servants' salary and allowance gets bigger. And the proposed budget for the incoming fiscal year, due to be unveiled in the parliament on June 3, is no different.
Some Tk 71,350 crore has been earmarked for bureaucrats' payroll in fiscal 2021-22, which is an increase of 8.3 percent from this year, according to finance ministry officials.
The amount is 11.8 percent of the proposed budget. In fiscal 2020-21, it was 11.6 percent of the budget.
The substantial allocation in every budget begs the question: is the service quality from public services improving with it?
"It's an emphatic no," said Nasiruddin Ahmed, a former chairman of the National Bureau of Revenue.
In fiscal 2015-16, under the new pay structure, the basic salary of civil servants was hiked as much as 101 percent, and in the following year, their allowance was bettered. They are also allowed low-interest loans to buy flats and cars.
To implement the new pay structure, which was staggered across two fiscal years, the government had to set aside almost double the sum than it did before.
In fiscal 2014-15, the budgetary allocation for bureaucrats' payroll was Tk 28,820 crore. In fiscal 2016-17, when the new pay scale was fully implemented, it was Tk 49,043 crore.
With the higher pay, it is natural to expect the quality of service to improve and corruption to moderate, said Ahmed, who has been in civil service for 37 years with spells in the finance ministry, housing and public works ministry, Rural Electrification Board, Prime Minister's Office and Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre.
"Corruption happens because of two reasons: need and greed. Greed can't be solved but need can be -- and that is what the government tried to address with the eighth pay scale."
And yet, corruption stayed as it is, said Ahmed, a former commissioner of the Anti-Corruption Commission.
Bangladesh slipped two notches in the Corruption Perceptions Index 2020, the flagship publication of Transparency International, to come ahead of only Afghanistan among the South Asian nations in tackling graft.
The country ranked 146th, which is 12th from the bottom. Bangladesh's score remained for the third time but the others improved theirs to leapfrog the country.
The government is in the civil administration's grip, said Ahsan H Mansur, executive director of the Policy Research Institute, a private think-tank.
"They are living like lords on public's money. We are just not getting the service. Please tell me where the service quality has improved and bribing has subsided? So what was the point of the pay rise? There has been no improvement in efficiency or accountability -- it is all whitewash."
What is particularly grating is that for want of civil servants' will among civil servants, the development budget remains largely unused, said Mansur, a former economist of the International Monetary Fund.
The allocation for the annual development programme is invariably revised down generously towards the end of the fiscal year to show a flattering implementation rate at the end of the year.
In fiscal 2019-20, the implementation of the revised ADP was 80.4 percent, according to data from the Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Division. In fiscal 2015-16, when the new pay scale was implemented, it was 92.7 percent.
Many of the ongoing projects are set to expire next year and yet they are nowhere near completion.
As is often the case, project designs are never right; they need to be modified a few times, leading to delays and cost overruns.
There are also questions about the quality of the work that takes place.
Many of these issues can be improved if the finance ministry takes ownership of the ADP budget and gets backing from the Prime Minister's Office, according to Ahmed, a former secretary of the Internal Resources Division under the finance ministry.
"The project directors do not own the projects -- they are after fancy cars and foreign tours," he said, while calling for stronger monitoring of the projects.
Service quality, however, improved in areas where there has been automation.
"But during my time at NBR, I have seen resistance to automation."
For instance, the move to automate the value-added tax system began in 2013. That project is supposed to be completed next month, after multiples extensions.
"There is a nexus between tax officials and businessmen that is preventing full automation. And the businessmen are nowadays politicians too. There is a big principal-agent problem," Ahmed added.
In economics, the principal-agent problem is a conflict in priorities between a person or group and the representative authorised to act on their behalf. An agent may act in a way that is contrary to the best interests of the principal.
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