On the impact of excessive document flow on the labor activity of a budgetary organization employee

Abstract

The causes and results of the formation of excessive workflow in budgetary organizations are analyzed with the help of mathematical modeling. The model was built taking into account the opinion of the former head of the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation Maxim Oreshkin, according to whom excessive reporting consumes a huge amount of resources, and therefore can be generated with a hostile intent to create an obstacle to achieving national goals. The model is based on the following assumptions: An agent (an employee of a budgetary organization) cannot refuse to carry out the reporting burden. An official (an employee of a higher ranking organization or a representative of government bodies) has an uncontrolled and unlimited opportunity to demand that the controlled organization draw up documents in the form proposed by him and provide them within the specified time. The utility of the official increases with receipt of these documents. It is shown that under such conditions the official benefits by unlimitedly increasing labor intensity of the reporting burden imposed on the agent. As a result of an increase in the amount of unpaid effort spent by an agent on reporting, his activity, which is determined by the part of paid efforts that exceed their minimum volume, drops to zero. The activity of two officials is compared: one of them has no hostile intentions and simply increases his work’s utility, while the other pursues a hostile goal to paralyze the work of the controlled organization. It is shown that there is only a quantitative difference in the results of their activities: the threshold value of the complexity of tasks, the achievement or exceeding of which destroys the activity of the agent, is lower in the case of a hostile official. Three possible ways of limiting the activity of an official are discussed: taxing the controlling organization with a corrective tax, full compensation for the costs of the controlled organization, and legislative restriction of document flow.