The Tyranny of Silly Expense Control Rules
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The British Broadcasting Company started a rule about "no biscuits for meetings of only internal BBC staff". That saved them over £200,000. I don't know what that was in USD in 2001, but it's a reasonable amount. I also don't know how much good-will they lost amongst staff.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2001/jul/25/broadcasting.bbc)
> According to a report compiled by the BBC's "revenue, procurement and services" department, the BBC spends £3m a year on catering hospitality, of which £350,000 goes on free tea and coffee for staff - not counting refreshments provided for meetings.
> A further £210,000 is spent annually on biscuits for meetings of BBC executives and middle managers, with half of the snacks consumed at BBC Television Centre in west London. About £500,000 goes on complimentary lunches, meals and buffets for employees; £80,000 on alcohol and £100,000 on "miscellaneous staff events".
Remember that the BBC is funded by a "tax" / licence fee that people must pay if they install or use a TV to receive broadcast signals. "TV" in that sentence includes computers / smart phones capable of receiving live streaming Internet. "Broadcast signals" in that sentence does not just include BBC. A person might never watch anything by the BBC, they still need to pay the tax.
I never saw a biscuit in a meeting, let alone ate one - although I'm sure thats because I was at the most junior level of the organization at the time (year 2000).
But let's just calm down a little over this £200,000 figure - 27,000 people worked for BBC in 2001. So that's £7.41 a year per employee on biscuits and snacks to be consumed in meetings. Doesn't sound all that crazy to me, personally. I wonder how much BBC paid per year per employee on toilet bowl cleaner or light bulbs?
In more recent times the BBC has had a massive reduction in it's budget and so the amount of cost cutting going on there totally eclipses the biscuit debacle.
Finally, it's not a tax. Taxes are paid to governments. BBC is not part of the government (thank god). And while you may resent paying £2.80/week for the BBC the British media landscape would be a lot poorer without it - even if you were to never watch a BBC channel or look at a BBC website.
If you don't believe me, try living in the US for 6 years and examine the horrible state of media in this country.
As for the horrible state of media, just compare for a second the production values and quality of Dr Who vs Battlestar Galactica... Or any other of a hundred US import shows.
Ah but that's not a fair comparison. For a show to be imported to the UK (with a much smaller population) it will have to be quite well ranked US TV show. They aren't going to be importing the bottom quality 25%. As a result, you're probably seeing the best USA TV there is.
You say that you worked there, and had meetings, but never saw a biscuit? Thus, the figure isn't £200,000 / 27,000; but is £200,000 / however many people went to meetings where biscuits were served.
Also, £7.41 a year per person for meeting biscuits is a lot of biscuits when you have economies of scale like the BBC.
Finally: It might not be a tax but don't forget it's a special licence fee, protected with its own bit of legislation, where non-payment results in fines and non-payment of those fines was a significant cause of imprisonment of women. There aren't many other products with that kind of fee-structure. I agree the BBC is brilliant. I do think it's weird that Bob (who never ever watches BBC, or uses the website, or listens to BBC radio) but who has a telly has to pay the licence while Ann (who does listen to BBC radio all day, while noodling about on BBC websites, ) doesn't.
(In the UK) if Bob drives a car and doesn't pay for insurance he will get fined or go to prison. Yet Ann can ride her bike, crash into a pedestrian cross the street while uninsured.
There's an example of another "special fee" with its own legislation which also has loopholes/inconsistances. There are many others.
Non-payment of car insurance is handled by the police. Non-payment of tv licence is handled by a private company.
The TVL database is the largest civilian database in the UK, with details of 30million addresses. Cost of enforcement has been used as a reason to scrap the licence fee, by a previous BBC director general (Greg Dyke.)
While it's possible to kill people and cause a lot of damage on a push-bike it is considerably harder to do so than whilst driving a car. And the analogy breaks down further - I can listen to BBC radio all day; I can use the BBC website all day; I can even watch BBC tv programmes on the BBC video on demand service BBC iPlayer (so long as they are time-shifted and not live-streaming) without having to buy a licence. But as soon as I want to watch, for example, Sky, I need to pay the licence to BBC and pay a subscription to Sky.
For your analogy: As soon as Ann passes her driving test and buys a Ford she needs to pay money to Chrysler to allow her to drive.
(But all of my analogies suck!)
That's $5,700,000,000.
Source: http://nerdr.com/uk-bbc-tv-license-fee-us-perspective/
For a TV channel.
Surely there are better uses for that tax money than paying off some silver spoon TV Execs?
Further it's a myth that the BBC doesn't carry advertising. If you watch it, you will see lots of it - just for other BBC products and services. To me it makes no difference if the BBC is advertising itself or washing powder - it still shows repeats and reality TV like any other channel.
I'd think it a sign of societal wellbeing that we spend more on ensuring that we have a source of quality journalism than we do on waging war.
The comments on that article go to show there exist conflicting views on the BBC's usefulness, in which case, it is unethical to force the tax on practically everyone who lives there.
Their charter "specifies that the mission of the Corporation is to inform, educate and entertain. It states that the Corporation exists to serve the public interest and to promote its public purposes: sustaining citizenship and civil society, promoting education and learning, stimulating creativity and cultural excellence", according to Wikipedia.
A free market comparison might be BSkyB. They have about a 20% bigger revenue. I don't think they do work just as well. I think the BBC is a national treasure (and I don't live there, I just buy their DVDs such as "Planet Earth").
That is as much of an understatement as if one said that Apple makes PCs, Media players and sells MP3s.
BBC stuff is really, really, epically, majestically good. BBC is primarily a production company, producing really thought provoking, quality, expensive (!) and often ahead of its time content.
In Slovenia we have the same scheme for financing our national media house. And we get a lot less bang for our buck.
Nope. I've also worked for Rupert Murdoch and other private media entities. Free market is what got as the phone hacking scandal to give one example (there are countless).
The US is sorely lacking in high quality reportage through to certain areas of high-brow television programming due to market forces which are concentrating budgets towards maximum ROI media.
The comments on that article go to show there exist conflicting views on the BBC's usefulness, in which case, it is unethical to force the tax on practically everyone who lives there.
Hmm, well lets just look at tax itself (ie the %age you pay on your earnings). There's certainly an array of views on the usefulness/appropriateness of taxing people yet we have to have it for the greater good. When someone says that they never watch any BBC output whatsoever (which is highly unlikely but still) they are still benefiting from the BBC's presence in the media landscape and the emphasis it has on it's competition.
For example, none of the other UK broadcasters had any plans on offering online TV on demand until the BBC launched iPlayer.
edit: It seems gaius is correct below - the World Service funding doesn't come from the BBC TV surcharge.
The World Service is now funded from the license fee combined with commercial revenues (eg selling World Service news to NPR).
In some ways it is a good thing that the government is not funding BBC World Service as that removes an argument for bias (not that I ever saw any when I was seconded to work on World Service Russian and Spanish language sites).
- They saved £200,000 by not having biscuits at meetings of executive and middle-managers.
- They continued having large, expensive meetings of large, expensive staffs of executive and middle-managers who don't add value.
They would have saved ten times as much by getting much better biscuits and firing large swaths of their management staff.
However biscuits can vary a lot in price, from fancy brand name biscuits to white label, 'own brand' biscuits. I'll also bet the employees were picking them up in corner shops at an even higher mark-up. As a result the BBC was probably paying too much per biscuit. Since it's hard to (a) enforce a maximum price per biscuit (who's job will it be to count the number of biscuits per packet? :P), or (b) institute an organised corporation wide biscuit-buying-and-distribution system, they probably went with the simplest approach of banning paying for any biscuits.
But that the same time I want the government to be forced to undergo not just this level of scruteny but a far harsher one. Why? Because I am forced to pay for it so they damn better work hard for it.
The problem is that with government, there is no mechanism for assessing whether the costs of a regulation are outweighed by its benefits. What good does banning biscuits at company meetings do? Yes, you've saved 200 thousand odd pounds sterling, but what has it cost you?
More importantly, what's the accumulated costs of all of these little regulations. Individually, they don't sound like much, but if you get enough of them, they really start to drag on productivity. What's worse, the impact of these regulations tends to be non-linear. Something as little as "no more free pop at all hands meetings" can lead to an exodus of talent if it happens to be the last straw, as it were.
EDIT: Joel Spolsky had a very nice column on this, but I can't find it at the moment.
See also (again in the UK) the many people entitled to some benefits who do not claim those. I believe (but have no evidence) that part of the reason is the vigorous scrutiny that people go through. This doesn't stop criminal gangs from making large sums of money from benefit fraud.
The day rate is $XXX in Europe, $YYY in USA and $ZZZ in Japan, there are tables of relative cost available. If you want to stay in a cheaper hotel/with friends/use your airmiles you keep the money, if you want to spend extra and stay in a nicer hotel - eat at fancier restaurants - fine you pay the extra yourself.
Cut your nose to spite your face much?
As all economists know, people respond to incentives. You invite externals, you get free food|coffee|biscuits. Design your incentives very carefully.
I did however make the mistake of buying a coffee and a burger at the station on the way back! My entire expenses claim was denied (train/taxi/etc) because a lunch had been provided and the meeting was only one day and so only one meal could be claimed for.
Eventually after much back and forth the govt dept sent someone to my university to 'explain things to me'. I can claim for one meal - but it didn't matter how much it cost! I could have claimed for a 12course banquet at the Ritz, but I couldn't claim for two separate slices of pizza - because that was two meals.
Examples of this abound.
Am I understanding this correct? He threw away $1500 because he couldn't be bothered to turn in the receipts?
Am I the only one that can't quite bring up a lot of sympathy for such a situation? "The tyranny" ... come on. Not if you're in a position to "make the rational decision" to throw away $1500.
However, my personal experience with bureaucracies like these has led me to collecting these little red-tape gems and writing a book.
Didn't HP do this to one of their CxOs?
Thirty seven weeks to get a $12 receipt reimbursed might eventually cause someone to quit, saving you millions.
Schools have been getting crunched for cash every year for the last 10 or so, and every couple years a new local politician is elected with promises to "eliminate waste", after the last guy declined to run again in disgust at how little he could do (can't change the revenue level or union contract, all he can do is try to account for stupid pencils). New guy wants to do something, though, so the end result of that is penny-wise and pound-foolish policies. No need for a grand conspiracy.