...in the JAMSTEC budget. It is amusing to see how blatantly these things are done. The scenario is, we get some money direct from the Ministry (presumably intended for "strategic" work or something along those lines) and other funding which although it comes from the same ministry, is more explicitly contract-based for a time-limited project with vaguely defined outputs. The former budget is supposed to be going down by around 6%, but the contract end of things is pretty well flush with money. So, the cunning plan is that people are being redesignated as working on the contract rather than the core funding. They aren't actually changing their work, the different areas are not well enough defined to distinguish them anyway, and there is no way of measuring whether one part is producing less than it should be...
Actually, there is another trick being implemented as well, in that money that JAMSTEC used to pass on from the Ministry to another linked organisation is no longer going through our books - the money will still end up in the same place, but it is no longer part of JAMSTEC's budget, therefore the budget has gone down. This hardly even qualifies for the phrase "smoke and mirrors" because no-one who looks at the overall flow of money can be unaware of what is going on.
Mind you, NERC did much the same - or worse - when we were back in the UK. The standard practice there when money had to be saved was to find some oldish senior scientist, offer him a cushy early retirement deal with a topped up pension, so instead of taking (say) 40k UKP salary, he would go and play golf on 20k UKP. Then the lab would employ a junior scientist on 20k to do the same job, only probably not as well because they were junior and inexperienced. Net saving.....well here is the trick. The government is still paying out just as much, and the quality of work has probably dropped...but pension comes out of a different budget, so the lab has saved 20k. This system falls apart a few years later when (a) there are no 54-year olds left (the age at which early retirement becomes particularly attractive) and (b) the lab stops producing anything useful because all the decent people with any experience are long gone. As has the Chief Executive and Lab Director, of course, so what do they care.
Actually, there is another trick being implemented as well, in that money that JAMSTEC used to pass on from the Ministry to another linked organisation is no longer going through our books - the money will still end up in the same place, but it is no longer part of JAMSTEC's budget, therefore the budget has gone down. This hardly even qualifies for the phrase "smoke and mirrors" because no-one who looks at the overall flow of money can be unaware of what is going on.
Mind you, NERC did much the same - or worse - when we were back in the UK. The standard practice there when money had to be saved was to find some oldish senior scientist, offer him a cushy early retirement deal with a topped up pension, so instead of taking (say) 40k UKP salary, he would go and play golf on 20k UKP. Then the lab would employ a junior scientist on 20k to do the same job, only probably not as well because they were junior and inexperienced. Net saving.....well here is the trick. The government is still paying out just as much, and the quality of work has probably dropped...but pension comes out of a different budget, so the lab has saved 20k. This system falls apart a few years later when (a) there are no 54-year olds left (the age at which early retirement becomes particularly attractive) and (b) the lab stops producing anything useful because all the decent people with any experience are long gone. As has the Chief Executive and Lab Director, of course, so what do they care.
2 comments:
And people get paid big bucks to play these games...
Every institution (commercial, medical, academic) I've been in for the past 20 years does this stuff, i.e. put up a big increase for next year, crazily spend unspent monday from this year, etc. It's like when the oil companies claim "huge losses" because their predictions for $10 billion in profits turn out to be $9 billion.
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