Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
But what is not acceptable is that MAS is not hiring staff at a fast enough pace to keep up. The workload has increased by 50% but the staff count has only increased by 10%.
The choices are quite simple to me actually, you either make a real effort to address the staff shortage, or you stop being a hero and regulate within your means. There is no shame at all in being a less-sophisticated regulator. We ought to recall the trite saying that "one cannot have his cake and eat it too". |
I can shed some light on this. Headcount is not
MAS' fault since manpower is limited for all public sector agencies centrally by MOF under MMF (s://.mof.gov.sg/news-publications/parliamentary-replies/Productivity-Growth-of-The-Government), and agencies are penalised if they hire above their MMF quotas (most agencies will have their annual budget from MOF reduced for each headcount over quota, or else they have to pay an equivalent penalty sum to MOF if they are revenue-generating agencies like
MAS).
Therefore, the only way forward is to deprioritise work, and management needs to be aware of the risk trade-offs in assigning headcounts to BAU stuff vs new areas like crypto and e-payments.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
But what MAS sorely lacks is its ability to digitalize.
It is somewhat ironic that MAS keeps pushing its financial institutions to digitalize, but its own internal processes are so manual and slow. A lot of information is scattered all over the place and impossible to find. This is because for some departments, there seems to be the lack of a proper filing system, even for routine/mundane matters. |
Management is well aware of this hypocrisy, but this stems from an organisation culture issue and generally culture issues can't be solved easily. Unlike profit-driven private companies where you can force rapid culture change from top-down and fire those who refuse to change or somehow get them to resign (even then, this worked for DBS but not for Lazada), you can't do that in public sector agencies not only because of the potential backlash, but also because it runs contrary to the government's objective of trying to encourage people to remain in the workforce (yes, it's mainly the older ones who are more resistant to change everywhere, even in the private sector).
Maybe the whole public service needs to come up with a way to penalise people who refuse to learn and adapt in some way, but that's probably a far larger point for another day.