While the policy was introduced to protect officials acting in good faith, some local cadres said fear of complaints and accountability measures continued to discourage initiative.
“Whatever we do, the first thing we think about is whether it could cause trouble,” a township official was cited as saying in the report.
Data collection has emerged as another source of frustration. Officials described frequent requests for statistics on tight deadlines, sometimes involving information that is difficult to verify within the allotted time.
In response, some admitted to resorting to outdated records or fabricated data simply to meet reporting requirements.
The report also said an excessive focus on documentation had fostered a culture of “leaving a mark”, as some officials treated paper trails as a safeguard against accountability.
But this practice, it cautioned, could “drain morale and sap the energy” of local officials, who could become preoccupied with producing and retroactively compiling records for inspection rather than focusing on substantive work.
“Requirements for meeting materials at the grass-roots level should be streamlined, and officials should be encouraged to speak without prepared scripts,” an official said, according to the report.
Experts cited in the report suggested clearer lines of responsibility and a shift from process-based assessments to outcome-based evaluations.
They said more needed to be done to set up clearer and more practical criteria for applying the error-tolerance mechanism, as well as to make greater use of case studies and precedents.
This article was first published on SCMP.
