The monster that is eating our few pennies

Feb 07, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The Ministry of Finance is looking for economic and financial analysts. Eligible candidates will be expected to possess, at the minimum, a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics, Management, Accounting or other relevant fields.
But it is not the eligibility requirements which raise eyebrows but rather the list of duties. The successful candidate will be expected to perform various functions, including budget preparation and execution, expenditure planning and management, monitoring and evaluation, project research, macroeconomic analysis and revenue forecasting and planning.
The salary, which the position of economic and financial analyst will attract was not stated. But given the demanding job description, it has to be one hell of a lot of money.
No human being, except blessed with supreme powers, should ever be expected to undertake such a wide range of responsibilities. That position is six jobs rolled into one.
The job description of this one position reflects one of the yet to be resolved dilemmas affecting public administration. But there is also another which is not yet resolved ensuring greater equity is pay across the public service.
Last November, the Senior Minister in the Office of the President announced that this year, 2022, the government would set about rectifying the irregularities in salary scales across positions in the public sector. The Minister noted that persons with similar qualifications were earning disparately different salaries across the public service.
But that should not be a problem. In fact, it is quite healthy for there to be disparities in pay across the public service so as to attract skills and allow for persons to graduate from one agency to another.
If the government is serious about parity, it should be less concerned about consistency in terms of pay according to qualifications and more concerned with rationalising the pay according to positions across the public service.
One of the disappointing aspects of the just-concluded debate over the 2022 Budget has been the almost total absence of public service reform, including the need to rationalise salaries so that persons deserving of higher pay are rewarded. Unfortunately, public sector reform has been placed on the backburner in favour of “scholarships, scholarships, scholarships”.
An oil and gas economy requires a different type of sector than that which existed before. This should have been one of the foremost priorities. Instead, it appears to be the least of the concern of the administration which has failed abysmally to initiate major public sector reform, including trimming a bloated bureaucracy which gobbles up a disproportionate amount of public revenues.
Professor Tarron Khemraj had done an analysis of the current expenditure/capital expenditure ratio over the period 2008 to 2020. What he found was disturbing. Guyana was spending 66 percent on current expenditure and 34 percent on capital expenditure. In comparison, Khemraj found that over the same period 2008-2020, Jamaica spent on average, 34 percent on current expenditure, Barbados 23 percent and Trinidad and Tobago 17 percent.
In the 2022 Budget, it is expected that, when approved, current expenditure will account for 60 percent of total public expenditure, despite the massive increase of more than G$100B in capital spending expected this year.
This is clearly an unsustainable situation. If there was any place where greater cuts needed to be made to help place more monies and services into the hands of average citizens, it should have been in reducing the distended public bureaucracy which this year alone will cost taxpayers more than G$1B for each working day.
And it is going to be made worse by the absence of public service reform. Such reform is controversial but is nonetheless absolutely necessary if the government is to get a grip on public finances.
The APNU+AFC had launched a Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service. It did not address the substantive structural issues of the public service and its financial sustainability.
The Commission did make some important recommendations. But the APNU+AFC placed these on the backburner, except for the recommendation of absorbing contract employees into the public service – a most unpopular measure which was applied mainly to those younger contract employees. Nothing was done in relation to extending the age of retirement or prohibiting the employment, on contract, of those public servants who have retired prior to reaching 65 years.
One of the more important recommendations made by the COI was for the “optimum complement of suitably qualified staff for each ministry, office, division, department, and unit, etc. with the right organisational structure, needs to be evaluated and determined by human resource and organisational audits.” This was not acted upon by the APNU+AFC.
The PPP/C seems bent on continuing to ignore public service reform. And this will be to the detriment of the country because there is no way that the country would be able to afford, in the distant, future, a paper- and pen-pushing bureaucracy which absorbs 6 out of every 10 dollars spent by the government.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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