BY LEE U-WEN

u-wen@newstoday.com.sg

THE civil service has successfully brought the human resource and finance services of government agencies under one roof, a move that promises to save up to $4.5 million a year.

A new department called the Centre for Shared Services (CSS) has been set up to take charge of common duties such as the payment of salaries and benefits, training and procurements.

The CSS, which began operating in April, is under the purview of the Ministry of Finance and is based in an office within the Ministry of National Development building along Maxwell Road.

About 60,000 public officers will benefit from the streamlined procedures, which the Government hopes will achieve greater efficiency through economies of scale. The idea to aggregate such shared services within the public sector was announced by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong when he delivered last year's Budget Speech in Parliament.

The department is being set up in two separate phases.

The first one in April saw about 350 staff who handle such HR and finance services joining the CSS from 18 government agencies. These include the larger ministries such as Home Affairs and Education, and statutory boards such as the National Environment Agency.

The second phase next April will add a further 20 agencies to the list, including the Transport and Foreign Affairs Ministries and the Supreme Court.

CSS chief executive Lim Hup Seng said yesterday the annual savings is expected to be up to 15 per cent of the $25 million to $30 million that the government agencies in the first phase currently spend on these services. These savings are expected to kick in from the second to third year of operation onwards, he said.

Addressing the staff of CSS at the department's official launch, Minister of State for Finance and Transport Mrs Lim Hwee Hua warned that the CSS should not simply "be just a factory where people are only focused on processing".

"CSS officers must build up the capacity to be process experts who will constantly look at how to improve the design of the work and lead the transformation of our work to deliver better outcomes for the public agencies," she said.

Having the CSS up and running, however, does not necessarily result in staff retrenchment, Mrs Lim explained.

More than nine in 10 of the staff from the 18 agencies offered the job at CSS took it up, she said. These officers, she added, would likely have their job responsibilities expanded, hence the need to retain and groom existing manpower.

CSS' Mr Lim said that, for a start, the officers would continue serving their own government agency. But over time, their role would be changed into a functional one that could require them to work across agencies.

Even so, the Government would not hesitate to lay staff off if the situation called for it, he said.

"When people can't fit in, and when it's inevitable, then we will retrench them. But we will minimise this as much as possible," said Mr Lim.