Overhaul of bureaucracy proposed

The government has decided to expand the coverage of the controversial internal revenue bill and restructure all other government agencies.

After a series of top-level discussions, economic planners said the economic managers group of the Cabinet has decided to propose a bill that would overhaul the entire bureaucracy.

Finance Secretary Juanita Amatong told reporters over the weekend that the Cabinet was meeting to set the performance parameters for the entire government bureaucracy that would determine who of some 1.5 million civil servants would be retained once the structural adjustments have been made.

"This effort will require legislation," said Amatong. "But the basic principles have been laid down and it will be an expansion of the National Revenue Authority or the NARA bill."

According to Amatong, the decision was prompted by the President who instructed the Cabinet to consider encompassing the rest of the bureaucracy with the principles laid down in the proposed NARA bill.

"Some of it can be done administratively but a lot of it would require legislation," Amatong said. "The administrative part, we will do immediately and that’s why we are now looking at government owned and controlled corporations."

Amatong said the government would be using its Organization Performance Indicators Framework (OPIF) which is already being used by the Civil Service Commission.

The government bureaucracy has always been one of the biggest weakness of the government’s expenditure program, eating up more than a third of the operating expenses.

Budget Secretary Emilia Boncodin said the restructuring was timely since the government has not done this in decades. "It’s about time we did this," she said. "Situations have changed, it’s a different world now than it was then and our bureaucracy must adjust."

The restructuring, according to Amatong, would enable the government to undertake what it called "productive spending" by realigning its scare resources for high-impact infrastructure.