H.—l4.

Departmental Activities. It is pleasing to be able to record that, more and more, are solicitors and the general public coming to consult Departments in the specialist matters being administered by them. This is properly the functions of the various Departments, and the acknowledgment of assistance by outside interests will help considerably to maintain the prestige of the Service. Annual Reports on Officers. The form of annual report adopted by the Commissioners and introduced in 1935 has proved very satisfactory in practice, and the reports on officers furnished at the end of each year have been of considerable benefit in providing the Commissioners with up-to-date knowledge of the officers of various Departments under their control and the manner in which such officers are carrying out their duties. Ability and merit and not mere length of service are the predominant factors in determining promotion, and consequently it is essential that detailed reports 011 officers should be available to the Commissioners when promotions within a Department or from one Department to another are under consideration. The system generally is to obtain individual reports from Controlling Officers on members of the staff under their control. These reports, after having been seen by the officers concerned, are forwarded to the Permanent Head for review so that any variation of standard adopted by different Controlling Officers may be smoothed out before the reports are submitted to the Commissioners. It is obvious, therefore, that there are two fundamental requisites of efficient reporting under this system. In the first place the Controlling Officers must exercise sound and impartial judgment in determining their markings of individual officers, and in the second place there must be unification of marking standards and correlation of marks at the Head Office of each Department. Unfortunately, recent experience has proved that while most Departments have endeavoured to fulfil the Commissioners' directions as to the compilation of the reports and some have attained a high standard of equity and uniformity, there are still some Departments where the unification of marking standards is not receiving adequate attention. The result is that an employee serving under a controlling officer with an unduly liberal standard of marking may obtain higher marks than a better officer who is under one with a more conservative standard. In more than one case which came before the Public Service Board of Appeal during the year the Department's summation of an appellant in its submissions to the Board was at variance with successive annual reports on the appellant. Then the Department found itself in the unenviable position of being compelled to admit that it had made no endeavour to unify marking standards. In a certain Department, which had actually made an attempt at correlation of marks, the results obtained were most unsatisfactory, mainly on account of the fact that the executive officer to whom the task was assigned was out of touch with district office staffs and therefore not qualified to sit in judgment on the markings awarded by District Controlling Officers. In a large Department it is, of course, not always possible to get an officer at Head Office who has a good knowledge of the whole of the staff. Under such circumstances the best plan for attaining uniformity in marking standards is to delegate the duty to a departmental committee of senior officers, one of whom should be the departmental Inspector who in the course of his work conies into contact with the staff at district offices. It cannot be too strongly advocated that it is essential to correlate the marking throughout each Department. It is manifestly unfair to officers, it misleads the Department, and it is a menace to the Service as a whole to allow this work to be handled in a perfunctory way or with a lack of conscientiousness. No stone should be left unturned to ensure that the preparation of annual reports on officers is done with the utmost thoroughness and faithfulness.

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