The Deputy Governor’s Office plans to introduce a Freedom of Information Act this year and see it passed, and the House of Assembly will create a policy for assistance grants, according to the planned “outputs” for those agencies listed in the territory’s budget, which was released by the Ministry of Finance this week.
This is the second year the budget document has included outputs, or items that each government agency is to use to measure its performance. Some outputs are specific goals, while others appear to amount to pledges to count routine activities.
Assessing outputs is an attempt to quantify agencies’ performance in a more meaningful way than simply checking whether they stayed within budget, Financial Secretary Neil Smith told the Beacon last year.
Although the budget document is formatted to show the count of outputs produced, so far the number of outputs and their targets have been left blank in most cases.
This may change soon, however: The Finance Ministry has been conducting training with public officers, and hopes to set up a baseline of specific outputs goals for each agency this year, said Deputy Financial Secretary Wendell Gaskin.
“At some point you have to be able to measure against something,” Mr. Gaskin said, adding that next year agencies will set more specific goals to go with their outputs. “We’re going to be able to say, ‘These were your targets and they weren’t met. What are you going to be doing different to meet these targets?’”
See the March 20, 2014 edition for full coverage.
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