Penny wise: Central Police Office told to cut expenses

Offices told to save paper, monitor monthly telephone bills.

LAHORE:

The office of the assistant inspector general (AIG) on Monday issued notice to the chief police office (CPO) complex with directions of to cut spending as a part of the austerity measures introduced by the logistics office.

The notice was issued by AIG (logistics) Fawad Qureshi to some fifty offices in the complex, who have been directed to save paper and monitor monthly telephone calls.

According to the directions in the notice, the officials have been instructed to sign all monthly telephone bills. This direction has, however, been met with resistance from some high ranked officials, who voiced concern over the notification coming from a lower office.

Secondly, the offices have been told to recycle paper by using blank sides of discarded paper or that already in use for applications, memos and requests within the complex.

Each of the 50 offices in the CPO complex has at least four phones lines, making a total of at least 200 lines. An official of the CPO complex told The Express Tribune that the average monthly bill for each line was Rs15,000, which meant as much as Rs3 million monthly for the entire complex.

The logistic office, which manages the payment of all expenses in the CPO complex from the local budget, has asked the senior officers in each office to sign the bills for the telephones in their offices.

This way, the notice stated, the officers will have a track of all the calls made by them and their subordinates in the month.

It will help them control the monthly telephone expenses and learn if their staff were making calls without their knowledge, it said. An official of the CPO office said that 300-400 reams of paper were used by the offices in a month.

More than half of the paper, he said, was wasted in the process of proofreading. He said instead of proofreading the entire document in one go, it was proofread line-by-line. The document was returned to the officer concerned to make corrections every single time a mistake was noticed.

He said if the officers abided by the directions, a lot of paper could be saved.

Qureshi told The Express Tribune that the initiative had been taken to cut down official expenditure.

He said that all official requests made on fresh paper were being turned down by the logistics department to encourage officers to follow the austerity drive.

He said that the initiative will help keep a track of the frequency of calls made from the offices each month. He said he expected the officers’ support to make the initiative a success.

However, an official of the CPO complex said that some officers have taken the signing of the phone bills as an offence considering it as a check on their phone calls.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2011.