Governance in Travel Allowance (inspired as a comment to other post)

This post is inspired to comment the following link:

http://ekonomi.kompasiana.com/manajemen/2011/07/13/antara-pegawai-negeri-dan-pegawai-swasta-bedanya-apa/

The rules/regulation for travel allowance is needed for the person (public officers and/or private employee) to do their job at other city other than their home town/office and also important for the organisation that assigning them (local government, central government, private company, etc). The main purpose of this allowance is to enable the person assigned to function with "acceptable" travelling supportive maters i.e. accommodation, meals, phone, laundry, etc. The specification of how much is the acceptable amount is varies according to the capacity of the person and the organisation itself. Comparing one to another is good as benchmark but may lead to dissatisfaction if found others better.

The main issue in designing and implementing this rules/regulation is highly related to good governance principles: integrity, accountability, and transparency. In brief, the principles can be describes as:

·Integrity relates with honesty and functionality is related to the reason making the travel

·Accountability relates to responsible for what the person accounted for including politically, administrative and financial.

·Transparency relates to access of the decision and the process of the assignment

For the person being assigned and decision maker of the assignment, the principles could be applied with these questions:

·To question Integrity: who is being assigned, who give the assignment and approval, why assigned there, what is expected from the assignment why that moment and is the one being assigned cam perform as expected, etc?

·To question accountability: what are the result, are the result is as expected, are the bills original and true, are all expenses related to the assignment, is the person assigned capable, etc?

·To question transparency: whether the decision to get the assignment done have crystal clear objective and acknowledge by stakeholders, what is the standard/base that underlying the decision to do the assignment, etc?

For the person and decision maker of that creates the rules, the principles could be applied with these questions:

·To question Integrity: is the rules flawless according to best knowledge known, is the rules has bunny hole to use to taken advantages that deliberately leaves open for escape if necessary, whether the creator of the rules has the capacity to perform the duty, etc?

·To question accountability: what are the rule’s control and supervision point, does the rule’s comply to all higher and applicable rules/laws, etc?

·To question transparency: is making the rules according to stakeholder’s best interest and acknowledgement, is the process decided to apply the rule is being acknowledge and approved by the stakeholders, etc?

The stakeholder itself is responsible for the product outcomes, application and review; thus the system will work as should be and minimizing the risk of fraud. Moreover, any rules should be periodically tested and exam to overcome identified weakness and to adopt correction to enhance it function.

Until next time - Be wise, Be successful!