TNAG-0812-FCO40-1017-Allegations-of-bribery-and-corruption-in-Hong-Kong-1978 — Page 77

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An integral part of every supervisory job is getting to know subordinate officers, their strengths, weaknesses, the way they go about their work, and the circumstances under which they operate. The depth of this knowledge, however, will depend upon the level of the officer and the extent of his area of responsibility. The conferring of responsibility presupposes the existence of three basic ingredients :-

.1 An accountable system. It would be unreasonable to

ask an officer to account if his area of responsibility is ill-defined or if his responsibilities overlap with those of other officers to a point where it becomes difficult to tell to whom and for what the officer is really answerable. To function efficiently, a Government department must have a structure in which units and individual members have clearly defined authority and responsibilities for which they can be held accountable.'

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A reasonable span of control. It would be unreasonable to expect a supervisor to directly manage, lead, and supervise too large a number of junior officers. The precise span of direct supervision must be decided in the light of the particular circumstances of the job, but clearly it should not be at a level beyond the effective compass of the supervisor.

Realistic goals. Officers should only be accountable for what they can realistically achieve. It would be unrealistic to hold an officer to be responsible for failure in enforcing an unenforceable law or for failure to achieve unrealistic objectives.

Failure by management to ensure that the above three prerequisites exist in any job may in many instances be sufficient to constitute mitigating circumstances when a supervisor is called to account.

The decision to hold a Government officer accountable as a supervisor is, therefore, a process of deciding what is reasonable, having considered the position the officer holds in the department, the knowledge he ought to have gained in relation to his area of responsibility, the structure of the department, and the objectives that have been set for him. As a general observation, accountability for the acts of one's immediate subordinates is far more readily definable than accountability for officers further removed in the chain of command. It should not be inferred from this generalisation, however, that senior management, for instance the Directorate of a department, are any less. accountable in practice than officers at the middle management levels and below. Circumstances have arisen and may well continue to arise where misconduct or malpractice is so widespread that it indicates that a particular policy, or practices and procedures leading from it, are not working or that a state of affairs has been reached which senior management should have foreseen and taken steps to avoid had they exercised sufficient diligence. In every position there must be an element of supervisory accountability, extending from the responsibility

The Civil Service Volume 1 Report of the Committee · 1966-68. Chairman Lord Fulton Chapter 5 Para. 145.

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