A few bright spots, but greater efficiency needed in the Public Service

May 22, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
I commend the Passport Office for what appears to be a streamlined and public-friendly process to handle the large volume of daily transactions for passports.
Last week, I visited the office to obtain a new passport, fully prepared to spend/waste half a day. I was pleasantly amazed when I completed my business in just over an hour. Staff checked my documents at the door, explained how the process worked, and pointed to where I should sit. In the time I was there, I detected none of the usual grumblings and “suck teeth” from the many citizens in the waiting room.
The entire process was adequately manned. What was a potential bottleneck activity in the process, (the data-inputting and the taking of photographs) was spread over five officers/stations. A few colleagues have since told me that their experience at the Passport Office was not as stress-free as mine. I suggest therefore that the authorities may have to ensure more consistency of their service.
On the other hand, my experience this year in trying to obtain a motor vehicle licence has run smack into the inadequacies and insensitivities of the GRA bureaucracy. I applaud the effort at decentralization and at waiting-room management (a shed and seats at Smyth Street, for example). But problems still remain. From what I understand, a new database is in operation, and as every IT database manager would tell you, Murphy’s Law always applies when large blocks of data are transferred from an old to a new system.
Many persons therefore who visited the GRA offices at the GPO Building or the VAT Office were frustrated that a mere missing piece of their data on the computer system meant they could not obtain a licence.
As the updating cannot apparently be done at the sub-offices, the counter clerks would send through an update request to the GRA main licence office. But at this very point, the process stalls again, as little attention or resource seems to be applied to wherever the updating is done. What this has meant for members of the public is several futile visits to check on their updates.
In looking at the operations at the Passport Office and the Licence Office, I would like to make several suggestions: (i) if speed and quality of service are the objectives, then all obstacles in the way of these objectives must be located and rooted out.
So, for example, the ridiculous situation at the VAT office last week where a clerk handling one kind of tax transaction (and had very few persons to attend to) could not switch over to handling motor vehicle licences (where only one clerk was processing a longer line of people) must not be allowed to occur; (ii) more resources (e.g., clerks and computers) and flexibility (e.g., more than one supervisor authorised to sign off on documents) must be applied to bottlenecks in the system; (iii) the tension between paperwork and computerization must be resolved in favour of the customer.
How much paper documents must I walk with if my data are already in the computerized database? As we move towards e-government, we will have to sort out this tension between paper and computer code; and (iv) waiting-room management techniques (a shed, a water-cooler, seats, etc.) are necessary, but should not be seen as an excuse or exoneration for slow and inefficient service.
A few years ago, a former UG lecturer who became the head of public service in Ontario, Canada, presented a talk at UG on the efforts being made to improve service to the citizens of Ontario. Two of his points remain with me. One, the move towards a one-shop approach for public service, where citizens can apply and obtain all their documents (passport, car licence, marriage certificate, etc.) from anyone designated government office. Secondly, the constant measurement of performance: In one survey he mentioned, university students were hired to call public offices to measure the time it took to answer the phone and the quality of service provided. Are we in Guyana exploring these and other improvements?
In closing, Mr. Editor, the connection between deliberate foot-dragging and bribe-seeking in the Public Service is well known. The revamping of the system for greater efficiencies must be accompanied therefore by proper remuneration, training, monitoring and easily enforceable penalties.
Sherwood Lowe

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