PUBLIC SERVICE, R.I.P
Written by: Andy Johnson

THE Trinidad and Tobago Public Service is outmoded. It can no longer meet the growing needs of a nation committed to moving forward, whether toward Developed Country Status by 2020, to what the Ministry of Finance is referring to even now as ’A World Class Nation’. This is the slogan on the Ministry’s colour-printed folder distributed yesterday at a presentation to reporters on the proposed Trinidad and Tobago Revenue Authority (TTRA).

Delivering that presentation in the main was Andre Vincent Henry, chairman of the TTRA Management Company Ltd, or as he loves to refer to it-’Ttramcol’. Other members of the board include corporate governance consultant Phillip Marshall, a former independent senator; Ingrid Lashley, chief executive officer at the Mortgage Finance Company; and Tecla Reyes, a former chief personnel officer, one of the top positions in the Public Service.

They were all present at yesterday’s ’overview’ of the TTRA as presented by Dr Henry, whose highly respected area of expertise is in the area of labour laws and practice, industrial relations, including worker-management relations, and the conventions and recommendations of the International Labour Organisation.

It seems fair to assume that they all, reasonable, fair-minded individuals demonstrably committed to the country’s progress and development, accept that the Public Service as we know it has become useless to the point where what remains of it will be of no consequence.

Fighting what appears already to be lost battle to stop the establishment of the TTRA, the PSA president calls it a ’voop’, a gamble that will have the effect of disrupting, if not destroying, the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of public servants.

Countering that to the contrary, this new entity would enhance lives and careers, Dr Henry is arguing that its establishment is premised on a government decision to correct what is now a ’mismatch between the dynamic demands of revenue collection administration and the static nature of the institutional framework’ which now exists.

Part of his argument favouring establishment of the TTRA is that, from a revenue collection base of $600 million in 1972, the national budget moved in the last decade alone from under $13 billion in 2001 to $50 billion this year.   ’We are really talking about a change in reality,’ he said.

Facing that ’reality’, he and his team are telling the country, means that the revenue collection operations have to be taken away from the Public Service. Attempts have been tried, over a long period, to reform and to restructure the Public Service for improved efficiency and performance. They have flopped.

Here, in essence, is the case against the Public Service: the TTRA will compensate and develop its employees, but it will make demands on them. The system of human resource and performance management in the Public Service is not particularly robust; it is weak and uneven in its application.

Only routine HR management functions are being dealt with. New terms and conditions for workers in the TTRA will be substantially enhanced. The bureaucracy, including the service commissions, operate a slow, centralised recruitment process, and this is principally why critical positions remain vacant for years. The personnel establishment in Customs and Excise, as an example, calls for 805 officers. At present, there are 455-just about 50 per cent of the required complement.  Whatever else may be behind the establishment of such authorities in other countries, in our context, it is because of Public Service failure.

Some people may decide, Dr Henry would also say, that they do not want to be part of an organisation that will demand performance from them. This assertion clearly tells us that performance in the Public Service is a personal thing, and there is not too much that anyone in charge can do about it.

Relating a tale as to why managers in the Public Service often refuse to act, Tecla Reyes said it can come down to a situation in which the officer seeking to discipline or to demand better performance from a staff member could end up as the one being investigated. Many managers adopt the position that they would rather not take any decision that has the effect of hampering another officer’s career chances. As a former CPO, permanent secretary and experienced head of other departments, she would know. But this, the Americans would have said, is no way to run a railroad.

Sum total of these shared experiences, the assertions of Dr Henry and the implied concurrence of those at the Ttramcol, is that the Government has admitted failure in all its attempts at reforming and modernising the Public Service.

It is therefore going to continue sidestepping it, to the point where whatever rump of it that remains would have no value, in terms of the country’s public administration. The TTRA is certainly not the first activation of that set of conclusions by a political directorate, but somehow it appears that the rate at of such calculated attrition is quickening.