A System That Shouldn't Work — And Doesn't
Table of Contents
TLDR - Summary:
A typical public-sector role pays a fixed salary, is nearly impossible to lose once confirmed, promotes by seniority, and has no equivalent of profit to measure performance against. Predict what a rational person does inside that structure, and the answer is: as little as possible. That is not a character flaw. It is what the incentives specify.
The issue
Corruption is usually treated as a shortage of honest people. It is better understood as a shortage of consequences. Adding an enforcer does not fix this — the enforcer can be captured too, which makes the problem recursive rather than merely hard. Failure carries no real cost: no lost pay, no real threat of dismissal, no dent in a promotion that arrives on schedule by tenure alone. Elections do not reach this level either — a government can lose, but the official who failed to do the work is untouched by it. And attempts to impose accountability meet organised resistance starting at the point of implementation, which then travels upward through the hierarchy.
The elusive solution
Commission-based pay fixes the incentive cleanly: paid for output, so the rational move is to produce it. Corporate appraisal systems are a milder version of the same logic, and they work — imperfectly, but they work — for two reasons government lacks: a real floor (you can be fired for doing nothing) and concentrated reward at the top (executives are paid enough to make results their problem too). Government has neither floor nor ceiling. No termination, no reward tied to outcomes, promotion by tenure regardless. On paper it should not function at all. It does not.
This is not an argument for switching every government job to commission, either — a police officer paid per arrest, or a tax officer paid per rupee collected, has an obvious reason to overreach, which is exactly why tenured, salaried civil service was designed the way it was in the first place. The honest complaint is narrower: the current system has kept the drawbacks of both models — nominal insulation from capture, and zero incentive to perform — without the benefit of either.
Why it doesn’t get implemented
Government employment has always doubled as an informal jobs-and-poverty-relief programme, and performance-based reform threatens that function directly — a large, organised reason to resist it. Much of the administrative structure was also built for colonial tax collection and control rather than service, and has never been fundamentally redesigned, only relabelled. More generally, any reform threatens a small, organised set of people who benefit from the status quo, against a public too diffuse to fight back with equal weight — reason enough on its own, everywhere, for bad systems to survive. Underneath it all sits one assumption: a government job is treated as something owed to whoever holds it, not a duty owed to whoever it serves. Fix the pay structure without fixing that, and the result is a better-paid version of the same problem.