TIDBITS AND OUTRAGES
Tidbits and Outrages In Droves You've heard a lot recently about how underpaid our top civil servants are. You probably assume they're resigning in droves to accept eager offers from private...
...Take the story of Joseph Yeldell...
...It promised to use the additional personnel to increase the number of audits performed during the 1974 fiscal year...
...Watergate Went Further Than You...
...Most bureaucrats don't work a minute over their allotted time and, if they do, are paid overtime or receive compensatory time off...
...Bintliff said he also was aware of the unverified reports that South Vietnamese President Thieu and Air Marshal Cao Ky had sent several mil: lions of dollars to the United States for Nixon's political campaign activities...
...No activity in a government agency is given as high a priority as securing and enlarging its budget...
...finds nothing wrong with spending more and more of his time and attention aiding the quest for more money (much of which is now needed to support the large money-raising apparatus that has grown up in the agency...
...Many government executives do work more than 40 hours a week without additional pay...
...yours...
...Their number, however, is not legion, and their motivation is frequently an overdeveloped instinct for self-advancement or the common American addiction to work as a flight from awareness of one's own insignificance...
...And he said Haig wanted some things checked out on the President...
...Under this policy, any shifts in auditing emphasis are supposed to be directed against groups with low compliance records...
...The government of the District of Columbia has 'satisfied the longings of 700 such people...
...Good Company In our early years, we were pretty much alone among publications in our interest in the subject we called "the culture of bureaucracy...
...You could get on a military plane and go in and out without any of the normal State Department travel documents...
...The IRS action, the GAO study said, resulted from the agency's attempts to justify a request to Congress for more auditors...
...The Good Life in Government People who dream of having soft jobs .often say they want to work in "personnel...
...What do we care if every official hires his mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter, and spouse, if they all do a good job...
...Here is the story, as reported by John Goshko in The Washington Post: "During 1073 and 1974 the Internal Revenue Service ignored its own rules by singling out middle-income taxpayers for a lopsided share of audit scrutiny, according to a government report made public yesterday...
...But we've got a lot of company now, some of it quite good...
...I was in the Special Actions Division at old Tempo B on the Ft...
...But while the upper-echelon line executive at Western Electric makes choices and decisions that put his job on the line, depending on whether the result is an increase or decrease in profitability, the HEW upper-echelon line executive makes his decisions in perfect safety: He doesn't deal in a measurable commodity, and no one will really know whether his decision was good or bad...
...The bureaucrats who promote the myth do so on the basis of what they hold up to be comparable executive positions in government and industry...
...Alexander Haig, reportedly ordered the Army's Criminal Investigation Command to conduct a secret investigation of any Nixon connections with huge cash contributions from countries in the Far East...
...The Haig investigation of Nixon in June 1974 was disclosed by Russell L. Bintliff of Denver, now a civilian but then an Army warrant officer and special agent of the CIC at Ft...
...To meet this commitment, the report continued, the IRS then directed its staff members to increase their audits of middle-income returns That was done, the report said, because middle-income audits usually can be accomplished quickly and help to boost the statistics of jobs completed...
...But he did not get banner headlines until he was accused of nepotism...
...It involved Caulfield and Ulasewicz' (John J. Caulfield and Anthony T. Ulasewicz, the two former New York policemen who were hired for special assignments by John Ehrlichman in the spring . of 1969 and became the first of the White House 'plumbers...
...It is true, however, that in certain glamour fields, private industry pays far more than government, and it is also true that too many top corporate executives receive shamefully high remuneration with which government does not and should not compete...
...The challenge to the press is to find out what they're doing, but nepotism is easier to report...
...The report by the General Accounting Office, Congress' watchdog on government operations, found that the IRS practice in 1973 and 1974 ran counter to the agency's official policy calling for the use of audits to ensure tax compliance by all categories of taxpayers...
...The civil service, which means most of Washington, is in fact an extended family of friends, who frequently take care of one another's relatives, on the basis of you hire mine arid I'll hire...
...Every newpaperman knows that...
...For comparison's sake, Jacksonville has one to 123 and San 'Francisco one to 136...
...Further down the scale, the average GS-15 has less responsibility and a far higher salary than the manager of your local supermarket...
...Gradually a hierarchy of administrative officers, executive officers, budget officers, congressional liaison officers and public information officers grows up, almost the sole purpose of which is fund-wheedling...
...Think The...
...Ts & Os Man Bites Dog Some years ago we published an article called "Stories Reporters Don't Write...
...Haig had just left...
...Here are some of the things Reed had to say: "People who choose government as a career are at least as competent, industrious and resourceful as those who go into the business world...
...That's a legitmate investigative story...
...Not so...
...Salary comparisons with industry are made on the basis of 'job descriptions.' Anybody who has ever worked in a government agency knows that job descriptions will endow a file clerk with responsibilities before which a graduate of the Harvard Business School would quail...
...One example is a recent article by Leonard Reed on the op-ed page of The Washington Post...
...For the top group of civil servants, called supergrades, the figure has been between six tenths of one per cent and 1.4 per cent...
...Tufts I pointed out that in those days an American didn't need a passport to get into Vietnam...
...Over the last five years resignations for the entire civil service have run between seven and eight per cent...
...Getting Tough With White-Collar Crime The Gerieral Accounting Office, God bless it, has come up with mother little' scandal that illustrates the way .the bureaucratic mind works...
...Notwithstanding the periodic pronouncements of 'salary commissions,' it is a myth that bureaucrats are underpaid...
...It now has a ratio of one personnel officer...
...You probably assume they're resigning in droves to accept eager offers from private business...
...Washington Star chose to bury this report by Jeremiah O'Leary in its inside pages...
...He told me Gen...
...to every 46 employees...
...Bintliff said he was ordered to conduct his investigation by CoL Henry H. Tufts, the CIC commander and now retired...
...Yet, the GAO report noted, middle-income taxpayers historically have the best record of paying their federal income taxes voluntarily, promptly, and honestly...
...A new bureaucracy, the darling of the administration that establishes it, has a missionary zeal about its function...
...I never could find that Caulfield and Ulasewicz had gone to the Far East, but in my verbal reports to Col...
...Equally fascinating are the stories they do write...
...He has for several years administered the District of Columbia's Department of Human Resources with unswerving incompetence...
...McNair base when the colonel called me into his office,' Bintliff said...
...McNair in Washington...
...does not exist...
...Incompetent administration on the other hand is ndt a legitimate story, yet it's the story we should get from the press...
...The irony is that nepotism should be the last thing to shake Washington...
...Since there is a certain logic to the proposition that without money an agency can't function, the bureaucrat...
...As a bureaucracy ages, it loses glamour and finds itself expending an increasing share of its energy on obtaining funds from a Congress faced with many competing claims, and expending correspondingly less energy on its original function...
...I concluded that they probably had gone to Vietnam...
...The bureaucrat who works 80 hours a week...
...We found it interesting: "Denver—Two months before President Nixon resigned, his White House chief of staff, Gen...
...Tidbits and Outrages In Droves You've heard a lot recently about how underpaid our top civil servants are...
...Bureaucrats almost invariably believe in the function their agency exists to perform, whether it is providing information to farmers or preserving the national forests...
...But it is hard as last week's rye toast to fire anyone in government, so to a greater extent than in private industry, the incompetents hang on to their government jobs...
Vol. 8 • January 1977 • No. 11
