In many countries, the Supreme Audit Institution is primarily a servant of Parliament and tries to serve it to the best of its ability. Recently we were informed that in Canada the Auditor General has extended this service to include appearances, not only before the Public Accounts Committee, but also before other committees of the Canadian Parliament ("Opinions", Office of the Auditor General of Canada, Vol.8, No.2, Spring 1990).
There have been significant advances in this area in Israel as well, during the past year. First of all, the Chairman of the Committee on State Audit Affairs of the Knesset decided to join forces with other standing parliamentary committees and discuss from time to time reports of the Israeli State Comptroller in a joint session; the State Audit Affairs Committee and another parliamentary committee, which in whose area of oversight the audit report deals with.
The chairmanship of such joint committee sessions rotates between the chairman of each committee in an informal way and the members of the two committees present questions and participate in the discussions. It is too early to evaluate the impact of this innovation.
Joint sessions of the committees of the Knesset discussing the state audit report is a significant advance.
Secondly, more and more meetings are being opened to the press. Up until now the practice was that the chairman of the Committee on State Audit Affairs issued a communique to the press on the discussions of the committee. Sometimes, following committee sessions, individual members of the committee were interviewed on radio and television. Lately, again in an informal manner, the sessions are attended by journalists, who follow the discussions, but are not allowed to participate in the debate or ask questions. This innovation leads to an expanded coverage of the committee's activities in the media.
Thirdly, efforts are underway to give the committee powers to summon public officials, including ministers, to its meetings to testify before the committee in connection with the reports submitted by Israel's SAL The granting of these powers have not yet been enacted, because it raises the larger problem of the appearance of witnesses before other standing committees of the Knesset as well.
Fourthly, the Committee on State Audit Affairs has made it a practice to invite to its deliberations not only officials but also representatives of interests that are affected by a state audit report. They may include the heads of powerful interest groups to private individuals who have submitted complaints to the committee on the subject matter under discussion. For example, in a recent session on the Broadcasting Authority's activities, the committee invited the representatives of the Israel Journalists Association; in another, a group of complainants claiming that the place of a certain type of ethnic songs, was under represented in broadcasts.
The trend of these changes, as can be seen, is to make the deliberations of the Committee on State Audit Affairs more accessible to the public and to strengthen its authority.
The State Comptroller's Office of Israel conducted an audit on the subject of political appointments in a number of government ministries and state institutions. The audit report was included in the State Comptroller's Annual Report No.39 of 1989. Following are excerpts from the introductory and concluding chapters of the report.
1. In the State of Israel, as in other democracies, the rule of the people finds its expression in the election of representatives who are to serve the people in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, for a period of office laid down by law. The Members of the Knesset bear a distinctive political identity which not only does not discredit or disqualify them, but on the contrary, they are elected to office precisely because of their political identity, and it is in this way that the will of the people and the democratic nature of the country find their expression.
2. Government ministers, who are the public's elected, are not only entitled, but are also obliged to bear a distinctive political identity when they are chosen for their respective tasks and are put in charge of the executive branch of government. However, in contrast to those standing at the head of the pyramid, the executive branch itself, in the state of Israel - i.e. the civil service- is based on permanent staff who do not change every time the political echelon in charge changes. These members of staff are meant to be appointed to their posts on the basis of their professional skills only, without their political identity playing any role at all in the classification, selection and appointment process.
Excepted from this general rule is a small number of appointments which are 'to enable the minister to operate the ministry in his charge in the light of his conceptions and the values for which reason he was elected to represent. The minister must therefore be enabled to appoint, at his discretion, a number of staff members close to him and who are to be at the top of the administrative ladder, under conditions which will meet the proper professional criteria', as stated in the draft recommendations of the expert committee headed by Prof. Y. Dror (henceforth: the Dror Committee.) which was appointed by the Civil Service Commissioner at the beginning of 1986. It is in this spirit that Prof. Y. Zamir declares in his article 'Ethics in Politics (Y. Zamir: Ethics in Politics, Mishpatim 17. Part II, p.277)
'The topic of political appointments is not new in Israel. It is not something unexpected that a minister should wish to appoint people from his party to the ministry of which he is in charge. The reason which is generally advanced for such appointments is that it helps the' implementation of the minister's policy, since a public servant with an outlook similar to that of the minister will understand his policy better, identify with it and therefore, also carry it out.
Yet generally speaking, this is actually not so, and certainly not in professional ministries in which almost no meaning can be attached to a political division between left and right, and not even in political ministries such as the Foreign Ministry. The experience in various countries, including Israel, shows that one may rely on the civil service to fulfill its function faithfully and in pursuance of the minister's and the government's policy. It is reasonable to assume that the principal reason for political appointments in many cases is a different one, namely to apportion public appointments as a boon, so as to strengthen the minister's personal standing within his partly or among a certain sector of the public. And if that is so, such appointments present a strong element of exploitation of a public office for personal purposes. In any cases, the harm done to society by politicising the civil service is self-evident.
3. In a fundamental judgement pronounced by the National Labour Court, the president of the Court declared (Hearing No3-168/48; P.D.A. 19,515, p. 528 opp. letter c.):
'It was made clear that the fact that a civil servant belongs to this or that political party ought to be a 'neutral factor' which should not at all be taken into account when a person is appointed or promoted. The fact that he belongs ,to the minister's or the director-general's party ought not to tip the scales in his favour, the same as his belonging to another party ought not to tip the scales to his detriment. Belonging to the party as the minister or the director-general must not interfere with a civil servant's appointment or promotion, if he possesses suitable qualifications which exceed those of other candidates: yet, this fact ought not to be taken into consideration at all as a point in his favour' when the qualifications of another civil servant exceed the former's qualifications.'
While it is true that these sentences were pronounced in connection with the appointment of civil servants to the National Insurance Institute, they should be applied as a general constitutional norm. Similar sentiments were expressed in the opinion submitted by the government's Attorney-General in March 1985 concerning the appointment of civil servants in government companies. In this opinion, it was stated that the general administration and the directors of a government company were not entitled to operate on instructions coming from outside the company, as far as fixing the establishment and appointing the company's senior officers are concerned. In this matter they are obliged to operate solely on the basis of the company's needs, its efficiency, its economy, the candidate's qualifications, and the like - considerations which are all intended to benefit the company. They must not be influenced in their considerations by the party membership or affiliation of a candidate for a given post, or by any other irrelevant considerations.
The Dror Committee, too, put at the top of its draft recommendations:
In principle Israel requires a government service at an excellent professional level which operates according to business-like considerations only, as laid down by law and in line with the tasks facing the State of Israel. The committee therefore recommends to restrict political activity and political appointments of civil servants. The fact that Israel still finds itself in the early stages of building its country and that we were bereft of the tradition of a political community residing on its own soil, still adds to the above mentioned principle and obliges us to observe it strictly,'
4. Concerning the legislation dealing with appointments, i.e. the Civil Service Law (Appointments) of 1959, the regulations and rules deriving from it, as well as certain sections in other legislations, have not really established the above mentioned principle as a general principle. However, a series of instructions in these enactments hold out the promise that once these instructions are carried out, both in the spirit and in the letter, we shall come to see the 'purity of, appointments' and the chance that every appointment in the public service will be filled by the most suitable person.
5. Most appointments to positions in the public service require competitive examination, either internal or public Only a few of the appointments are, according to the law, left to the sole discretion of the minister in charge. A few appointments are left to his discretion, but require consultations with or approval by one or other body. Some of these are left to the discretion of that body itself. And yet, apart from proper political appointments, as indicated above, the principle of 'neutrality' in the political sphere does apply to every appointment in which ever form it is being made.
In October and November 1988 the State Comptroller's Office conducted an audit on the subject of political appointments, particularly those which had been made in the last three years in a number of government ministries and in state institutions. The decision making process preceding these appointments was examined, as were their conditions of employment and their salaries.
The audit brought to light cases in which the binding rules governing the appointment of public service personnel and their conditions of employment were not adhered to. The shortcomings, indeed, keep on changing form, all according to the specific character of the appointment in question according to the way in which the appointment was made. But the similarity in all of them is that the political attachment of the candidates seems to those who had appointed them, to have been the cause of the shortcomings.
It must be emphasized that a candidate's political identity ought to play no role whatsoever in an appointment and must not lead to deficiencies and flaws. The shortcomings which were brought to light were not due to this or that political identity, but rather to the appointment itself which was made against the background of a certain political identity.
Generally speaking, no decisive proof is to be found in the documents of the audited bodies which would clearly point to the fact that the appointment was made due to political considerations, and one must also not expect to find such proof, but, on the contrary, to be faced with the attempt to conceal considerations of this kind. This, of course, makes the audit more troublesome, but the audit must not be prevented from taking placed for otherwise it would simply be impossible to conduct and audit on so important a subject. Because of the essential difficulty to sustain the suspicion with solid proof, the audit did not present those cases in which suspicion was certainly aroused concerning improper political considerations, but in which the flaws in the manner the appointment was made could not be discovered. The audit thus confined itself to presenting cases in which flaws were discovered (such as not conducting competitive examinations or deficiencies in their administration), and from the totality of the circumstances there emerged solid ground for the suspicion that the deficiencies point to political considerations which led to the appointment. (Examples which illustrate this phenomenon are included in the detailed audit report).
The audit brought to light that the improper political appointments were a current phenomenon in the civil service in a whole variety of functions. The findings which were brought to light point to the involvement of political considerations in some of the appointments at all levels, starting with officials at the beginning of their professional career and ending up with the management of public bodies and institutions. This phenomenon is not only characteristic for this or that sector, but extends over wide areas in the public administration.
It became clear that in many cases there were defects in the formal process of the appointment; either the obligation to conduct competitive examinations was not adhered to, or else it was adhered to in an irregular fashion. In cases where the appointing body did not interview a sufficient number of candidates, and in many cases no additional candidates at all were interviewed apart from the one who was appointed. It turned out that in all these cases, the formal defect was an external symptom which gave evidence of improper considerations in appointments. However, not in all cases were the improper considerations characterised by blatant external symptoms. In quite a few cases the process was, on the face of it, conducted properly, but when the considerations were examined objectively the suspicion arose that the appointment had been made on account of the appointee's political connections, rather than on account of his qualifications.
This afflicted system of political appointments reveals characteristic accompanying features. A system like this tends very frequently to swell and to expand, so as to make the absorption of the new functionary possible, without being shocked by it. And this is being done by creating needless new jobs, by dispersing existing tasks which had previously been successfully performed by a single person, by promotion to a position devoid of content, so ac to make their previous position available to those who want it, etc. There are cases where people, appointed for improper political reasons, were promoted quickly, well beyond the customary procedure in these places, and were granted benefits of different kinds. In a number of cases, such appointments gave rise to labour disputes.
As has been pointed out above, the political appointments keep changing shape, but the common feature which applies to them all is that it is not the most suitable person who obtains the position. In many cases, and in all cases mentioned above, the audit brought to light appointees whose qualifications did not the meet the requirements of the position to which they were appointed, whether it be on the grounds of their education, their experience, or other qualities required for the performance of the task in hand.
Moreover, the employment of staff on the basis of political considerations creates a feeling of uncertainty and instability among the staff as a whole, undermines the morale of the civil service and harms its image.
The system of political appointments thus leads to cause serious harm not only to proper administrative procedure and to integrity, but also to the professional level of the civil service.
The audit report shows the extent to which this phenomenon has spread. The audit indeed deals which appointments which were made during the last few years, but there is not doubt that this phenomenon started many years ago, and it should not be focussed on this or that place, nor on any particular person, nor on this or that side of the political spectrum. It is therefore most important to protect the civil service from any harm which may be done to it from whatever quarter.
In order to root out this defective phenomenon, the executive branch is required to exercise utmost punctiliousness, so as to ensure that appointments in the civil service are made in a proper fashion based on business-like considerations only. The public at large too must stand on its guard.
The strict observance of the rules on the part of the executive authority, vigorous activity on the part of the controlling, enforcement and audit authorities, together with the public's awareness and the vigilance of the media, -these hold the key to waging the war against this phenomenon and to eradicate it.