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When we
last looked at the Bureau of Customs (BOC), while we
admired its extraordinary successes in running after
smugglers through a USAID-funded campaign, we lamented
that its prosecutorial powers were severely constrained
by a dysfunctional structure the bureau had, over the
years, developed under.
As
administrations had come and gone, in the effort to
either make the agency more potent or simply just
larger, appendages were literally grafted and then grown
out of various task forces, institutionalized and given
autonomous lives of their own. Often it was an example
of the myopic turning hyperopic, long-term and
protracted beyond useful lives or the initial underlying
impetus.
Prosecution is especially critical for the BOC, where
both a strengthening of its legal muscle as well as its
enforcement appendages should be synergistic and
critical factors of success.
Over the
years, as the agency developed and matured, as happens
in most that wield the kind of powers the BOC has, there
were deliberate devolutions of its most potent powers.
That is understandable. Other than organizational
pubescence, political pressures are applied from both
the government’s administrative center and from an
affected public that had, over the years, learned to
deal with such an agency, albeit developing a modus
vivendi that, in indistinct ways, scattered the BOC’s
resources.
Growing
distant from the agency’s legal nerve center—what many
perceive as the bureau’s most important organ—appendages
often struck out on their own, sometimes to complement,
but in some occasions, also to compete. While in any
organization with the kind of complexities attendant to
the BOC, the devolution and dilution were neither
intentional nor deliberate and were simply the effect of
organizational expansion, what delegations and
transferences were created as a result eventually
weakened the agency.
Unfortunately, two aberrant organizational dilemmas
developed side by side: either critical responsibilities
fell between desks, or tasks and authorities were
duplicated, eventually becoming redundant, if not
sources of internal friction. Where these occurred, like
septic methane building up in neglected basements,
corruption started to spawn in those cracks and crevices
created by devolutions.
In the
case of the agency’s prosecutorial powers, an aspect
critical and sine qua non to its success, the
prosecutorial prerogatives were scattered among at least
eight other agencies. Some were stand-alone operational
subsidiaries. Others, simply connected by a faint dotted
line. In all, prosecutorial, investigative and
enforcement mandates had been stirred in.
At the
perimeter of its individual scope of duties and
responsibilities, the twilight zones are clear and
evident in the BOC’s various legal offices, from the
Investigation and Prosecution Division, to the Customs
Intelligence and Investigation Service, to the Internal
Inquiry and Prosecution Division, to the Office of the
Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Enforcement.
Add
subsets, redundancies and commonalities from the office
of the Director of Enforcement and Security Services,
the Prosecution and Litigation Division and the Legal
Services, and the merry mix-ups suddenly do not appear
quite as merry.
While
dysfunctionalities are readily evident from such
cocktails of functions and processes, for veteran
functionaries developed within the system, aged there,
barnacled and eventually encrusted within, taking a
longer and deeper self-critical view and therefore
compelling a reengineering would be impossible.
Never
mind that such organizational aberrations spawn
structural weaknesses. And never mind the moral
imperative to clean these out. The sticky stigma of the
corrupt customs collector, whether as pure illusion or
stark reality, is so ingrained that any structural
defect had become as inevitable as death and taxes.
Where
bureaucratic culture is old and degenerative, new, clean
blood and fresh faces often became the only solutions.
Where private-sector talent was infused at the BOC,
these would work, only for a while. Unfortunately,
calcified and corruption-ridden structures stood
defiantly against the efforts of the few good men who
entered the lion’s den.
Fortunately, in such an environment lay an advantage.
When the internationally funded Run After the Smugglers
(RATS) program was conceived in 2005, it quickly evolved
into a revenue-enhancement program that had at its core
an effective anticorruption campaign. RATS forced a
long-overdue self-review.
Ironically, running after smugglers also meant running
after crooks both outside and within the agency, a
curriculum now competently institutionalized by the few
unaffected by the BOC’s fossilized culture and
organizational structure.
Though a
relative newcomer to the bureau, Deputy Commissioner and
RATS executive director Reynaldo Umali had the advantage
of detached objectivity and unaffected enthusiasm. He
infused record competence not seen in a long time.
Seventy-eight cases filed against 349 respondents is the
new record. Achieved through an under-staffed team of
merely 36 lawyers and 56 staff, the accomplishment is
incomparable. That this was achieved despite an
ignominious bureaucracy long encrusted into its
plantilla made these successes even more admirable.
Recently, the Executive held up its end. On May 16,
Gloria Arroyo signed Executive Order 724 reorganizing
the legal infrastructure of the BOC and transferring
dangling prosecutorial powers from strewn agencies to
the bureau’s core legal unit. Streamlining from
disjointed eight units into two, the prosecutorial
functions, whether criminal or administrative, now
center on the Prosecution and Litigation Division-Legal
Services, while the review, evaluation and processing of
claims for rewards are transferred to the Office of the
Commissioner.
It’s not
just structural consolidation, but intelligent
rationalization. At least in this little corner of the
bureaucracy, something is being done right. |
