Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

302 Daniel Tommasi
Several industrial and developing countries use staff ceilings, which
are included in the budget documents. These staff ceilings generally give
the permissible full-time staff equivalent and are subject to internal
or external controls or both. When the size of the civil service must be
significantly reduced, personnel plans must often be prepared to determine
the specific staff sectors to be trimmed, to define an incentive policy,
to estimate the amount of redundancy payments, and so forth. Staff
ceilings would then be the annual implementation targets corresponding
to these personnel plans.
Staff ceilings should either be aggregated or be broken down into a few
broad categories. Some countries set very detailed staff ceilings by personnel
category, grade, and so forth and manage budgetary posts on this basis. Such
approaches can make personnel management rigid and should be avoided.
Staff ceilings serve as a tool for controlling the fiscal effect of the personnel
policy of agencies and as an aid in personnel management. Line ministries
should be made fully responsible for establishing staff ceilings for their subordinate
agencies, within the line ministry’s total staff ceiling. Appropriations
for personnel expenditures and staff ceilings should be consistent.
In the few developing countries where the size of the civil service does
not pose major problems and where methods for estimating personnel
expenditures are satisfactory, compulsory staff ceilings may not be needed.
In any case, however, information on personnel levels is required during
budget preparation and should be made public (as an annex to the budget).
the role of the ministry of finance. Personnel
management is preferably performed by line ministries; however, certain
central control and coordination mechanisms are needed. Schematically,
two main types of control and coordination tasks are used in managing government
personnel expenditures:
1. Budgetary control, which concerns financial aspects of the pay structure
for macroeconomic and fiscal management purposes and the setting of
policy priorities
2. Managerial control, which generally concerns technical aspects of the pay
structure and, more broadly, issues regarding working relations between
the government and its employees.
The managerial control measures are often coordinated and exercised
by central personnel management offices, such as civil service commissions,
civil service boards, and establishment boards, but any decision about