Red tape - understanding the morass

Isaac Asimov, in his witty short story ‘Blind Alley’, based upon his own experience in the US Navy, shows how an able bureaucrat (in this case, a planetary administrator) works strictly within the rules to make a change.

‘The rules and systems,’ says Asimov’s Civilian Supervisor Loodun Antyok, ‘must be sufficiently all embracing and rigid so that in case of incompetent officials ... little harm is done.’

The moral of the story is that competent officers are able to exercise their judgement within the system. There is a method in the madness and rules are meaningful.

If there was one good thing that the British colonial masters left Sri Lanka when they pulled out, it was their system of government administration. Like the system described by Asimov, it was designed primarily so that incompetent or venal officers could not make a mess of things.

Development effort

Unfortunately, the adherence to the letter rather than to the spirit can cause delays and inefficiencies. In the modern world, where so much depends on speed, this can be fatal to the development effort.

Customs procedure should be streamlined

An anecdote from a wharf clerk at the Colombo harbour illuminates how red tape can create huge harm. He was clearing some goods which were referred for appraisal, by the Customs officer at the Harbour Long Room, to the Valuation Division at Orugodawatte.

There he was told that the Customs officer at the Long Room had not endorsed the document, and he was sent back to the Harbour to get the necessary endorsement. This entailed a journey of two hours there and back in heavy traffic, carrying the item to be appraised.

This matter could easily have been expedited by a telephone conversation and an email or fax exchange between Orugodawatte and the Long Room. This is what would have happened in a developed country, so that the delay would be minimised.

Apparently, the procedure thereafter was for the document to be endorsed by the Director of Valuations and additionally by the Deputy Director of Valuations, before going to the Appraisal Officer, who does the actual work. In the absence of either Director, the matter cannot progress.

The current procedure results in delay in clearing items from the harbour. This in turn necessitates extra storage space for incoming containers. A speedier procedure would mean less outlay in harbour space and usage of infrastructure such as cranes could be reduced.

Foreign investment

The delay also means that modern production supply methods such as Just In Time cannot be employed effectively, since they depend on supplies arriving as scheduled.

Since Sri Lanka depends on exports rather than the internal market for its industrial base, foreign investment in manufacturing is unlikely to take place. The delays might be the same in India, but there is also a huge market there which makes up for them, so the investors would rather go there.

The point is not that the appraisal system should be abandoned. Hardly, since it is very necessary for ensuring the collection of Customs revenue and for the prevention of smuggling.

However, the current procedure constitutes a bottleneck in clearing imports. The system needs to be streamlined so that the delays can be eliminated.

The Customs have installed a modern computerised system. The Customs officer at the Long Room could have referred the matter to the valuation division electronically.

The item need not have been transported physically as it could be observed electronically through a webcam or possibly using one of the Customs’ ultrasonic scanners. Physical examination need only have taken place in case of doubt.

Valuation division

The question also arises as to whether the signatures of the two higher officers in the valuation division were required. Surely, the referral from the Long Room should be sufficient for appraisal to take place, should it not?

The entire public service in Sri Lanka suffers similarly from the fact that rules that were introduced over a 100 years ago, before the invention (let alone the introduction to Sri Lanka) of much of the modern office technology that is available today.

It was only in the 1970s that the archaic form of letter writing prescribed in the Establishments Code (‘Dear Sir, I have the honour to inform you that your firm has been blacklisted. I remain, Sir, Your obedient servant’) was modified. A morass of regulations remains to be updated.

There is a downside to government regulations, which is exacerbated by the use of jargon and intricate and insufficiently clear procedures. This is their use by venal officials and by intermediary outsiders or ‘fixers’.

Public service

In 2007, the Philippines passed the ‘Red Tape Act’, which openly identified ‘fixers’ as a major problem. The solution this embodied, was transparency and accountability, with clear explanations to the public in their own language of government procedures.

These explanations were to include the procedure to obtain a particular service, the persons responsible for each step, the time taken for the process, documents required, any fees and (most importantly) the procedure for filing complaints.

The government is working on the issue of providing all citizens to interface with it in their own language. The Official Language Policy requires that state institutions and departments should be bilingual and Sinhala and Tamil are now compulsory at Divisional Secretariats.

The government is also attempting to make the administration more user friendly by providing information about procedures to the public via internet and telephone. However, there remains a great deal that needs to be done.

The ‘Red Tape Act’ also mandated public-interfacing government offices regularly to carry out ‘time-and-motion studies, to undergo evaluation and improvement of their transaction systems and procedures and re-engineer the same’.

This example is one that could, with profit, be adopted by the public service in Sri Lanka. All procedures, not merely those involving the public, need to be updated using such modern tools as systems analysis, operational research, value engineering, and knowledge and change management.