Do public service managers spend more at the end of the year to secure bonuses?

Public Service Confidential is a workplace advice column for federal public servants. The following question has been edited for clarity and length.

I have been a public servant for many years. I have so many gripes and frustrations that I would need a new keyboard due to all the typing. So, I’ll start with one: 

The end of fiscal year splurge. If you’re a public servant, you know the email: We are nearing the end of the year and we have some extra cash to burn so bring forward any and all requests that you have. My understanding is that this happens every year because upper management needs to spend in order to align with their start-of-year forecasted budget so that everyone gets their bonuses.

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If that is in fact the reason, to me, as a taxpayer, this is totally and completely unacceptable. We should spend when we need to spend and not because there is extra money to burn in order to align budgets with forecasts. Then, come April 1, we have boxes and boxes of extra crap lying around — like TV monitors, whiteboards, headsets, etc. Are managers simply spending money to receive bonuses? Shouldn’t this practice be banned? 

I don’t care if you don’t get your bonus. That’s not the way we should be handling taxpayer money. Period. 

Note: I am off today so I’m not writing this during working hours. 

Sincerely, 
A public servant with a dislike of waste 

I, too, dislike waste, particularly when it concerns my own money or taxpayer money. So much so that once when I was traveling to Halifax for work as a director general, I took the bus from the airport into the city because it cost just $5 and someone said the cab ride was $60.

The “end of year fiscal splurge,” does happen in some departments sometimes, albeit, in my experience, it was not something that happened every year. There is often a “corporate commitment” in the Performance Management Agreements (PMAs) of executives that encourages executives to align end of year spending with budget forecasts. So, it is understandable why some may think that end-of-year spending is linked to performance pay.

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However, executive bonuses are rarely, if ever, linked directly and solely to financial results. For those departments that still do meaningful PMAs, the norm for awarding bonuses is usually more closely associated with delivering on major policy or program or operational responsibilities than the quality of management. In my experience, the quality of budgeting, forecasting and tracking spending against commitments is not given significant weight in the awarding of pay-at-risk bonuses.

So, it is not accurate to say “upper management needs to spend in order to align with their start-of-year forecasted budget so that everyone gets their bonuses.” What does happen is senior managers will sometimes delay discretionary spending early in the fiscal year to protect their financial room to manoeuvre to deal with unforeseen spending pressures in problem areas. If unforeseen pressures don’t materialize to the extent budgeted, it leaves room for some additional spending at the end of the year.

I would also argue that responsible end-of-year spending is OK to a point, particularly if it is focused on capital upgrades, such as upgrading a unit’s computers or laptops (on a three- or four-year cycle) or making funding available for targeted training and professional development opportunities for staff.

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Given this, I would hesitate to try to “ban” end-of-year spending. As a former fairly senior executive, I took pride in my efforts to spend prudently and wisely, and never “burned” taxpayer money for any reason. And, while some may say I am naïve, I believe the majority of managers do not spend taxpayer dollars frivolously at the end of the year.

I wholeheartedly agree that public sector managers “should spend when [they] need to spend and not because there is extra money to burn” and it discourages and upsets me to hear about boxes of “extra crap” lying around.

But the practice of irresponsible end-of-year spending, when it occurs, is not about upper management spending to protect their bonuses, it is simply examples of managers making poor value-for-money decisions and who sometimes forget it is not their money.

— Scott Taymun, Public Service Confidential

Scott Taymun is a former federal executive, who served more than 30 years across seven departments. He served as the chief of staff to the Clerk of the Privy Council and helped design and implement the public sector management reforms that followed the sponsorship scandal in the early 2000s. He retired from the public service in October 2023.

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Are you a public servant with questions about your workplace? Write to us anonymously at PSConfidential@postmedia.com and we’ll pick our favourites to send to an expert columnist. No gripe is too small. No topic is too big.  

Public Service Confidential is an advice column, written for the Ottawa Citizen by guest contributors Scott Taymun, Yazmine Laroche, Daniel Quan-Watson, Victoria De La Ronde and Chris Aylward. The information provided in this series is not legal advice and should not be construed as legal advice.

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