We are pleased that government has started reforming the civil service in keeping with recommendations laid out in the 2012 Job Analysis Project. Moving forward, however, the analysis should be released to the public, and further reforms should be implemented more transparently.
As part of the project, a $300,000 consultancy — conducted by the firm KPMG in collaboration with the Department of Human Resources — assessed government’s HR needs and job allocations.
As we argued when it launched in 2011, the consultancy was a significant step toward the comprehensive, long-term reform the civil service desperately needs.
Now as then, there is much work to be done in this regard. The civil service has expanded rapidly in recent decades: Though some agencies function as they should, many others are fraught with signs of inefficiency, disorganisation, waste, poor management and other problems.
Successive governments’ reform efforts have tended to apply Band-Aids rather than properly tackling underlying problems.
The job analysis, which was approved by the previous government in 2010, seemed different. After a series of consultations, workshops and surveys, the KPMG report was submitted to Cabinet in 2012 along with additional recommendations from an HR Department team. Since then, government has been mostly silent about the reform process.
On Monday, however, the HR Department announced the completion of a KPMG recommendation: replacing some 1,200 job descriptions with 563 more detailed “role profiles” designed to better define public officers’ responsibilities; clarify organisational structures; and allow for an improved appraisal system, among other steps.
Plans were also announced to implement other KPMG recommendations, including “technological, human resources and service delivery improvements.”
Though few details were provided, these steps all seem sound, and we are pleased that the KPMG report has not been shelved like so many other expensive consultancies carried out in the Virgin Islands.
But we see no reason why that report and the HR Department recommendations — both of which doubtlessly contain valuable information about the state of the civil service — shouldn’t be released to the public. After all, the Job Analysis Project was funded with taxpayer money, and it is being used to guide critical decisions about the taxpayer-funded civil service.
As we argue often, the public’s business should not be conducted in private. And during this time of economic hardship, when everyone is asked to sacrifice, who would doubt that civil service reform is the public’s business?
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