“[W]e gatekeep ‘excessively’ to the extent that we forget that gatekeeping incurs costs”

Here’s an interesting FB post from someone who is a volunteer in a social welfare group that he calls “CRT” in the text. CRT works with govt agencies: it submits applications on behalf of those looking for help from mthe govt.

Can u imagine the loss of productivity that results from his submissions and the efforts of the civil servants checking his submissions?

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I spent almost all of my ‘working’ hours today processing 3 financial assistance applications. It’s a programme offered by one of the social service agencies which CRT is collaborating with. The work includes explaining to people what this programme is about, how it works, interviewing them for the data required for the application, and collecting a whole ton of information (if I were to be a PDPC auditor, I think my assessment would be that this agency and programme is collecting far more information than they need for the purposes of the programme/assessment of application…), and then uploading and keying everything into the system.

Here’s what’s on the table. Each household whose application is approved receives up to $4,560 over a duration of 12 months.

As I trudged on with the all the administrative work, I asked myself whether this is ‘worth it’. Is it worth all the time we put in to get this application through? Is this level of gatekeeping worth it, and to what end?

I regularly ‘argue’ that sometimes we gatekeep ‘excessively’ to the extent that we forget that gatekeeping incurs costs. And it’s incredibly difficult to have the conversation on how costly gatekeeping is, simply because there seems to be little effort to track it. Or if the data is available, there is great reluctance to share it transparently.

But I guess today is a small experiment on quantifying the costs of gatekeeping. My last drawn pay (I last worked part-time, very entry and lowest-paid-rung kind of job at a social service agency), if pro-rated to full time, would be $2,000 gross. This means that it costs $100 for me to put up 3 applications. There has to be someone on the other end to review and approve the application, which I shall assume will incur the same costs too (they are likely to spend a lot of time looking at the application too, or maybe they’ll be paid higher than me lol). This is just to put up the application.

There’s a component of monthly review in this programme. So that takes up approximately 1 hour of my time per household. So that’s $11 per month per household. Assuming same assumptions above, the reviewing agency incurs $11 per month too. So that’s $22 per month.

That makes it approximately $60 (one-time) plus $22*12=$264, which in total adds up to $324 to gatekeep an assistance package worth $4,560 a year for one household. The estimated human cost of gatekeeping this amount of benefit amounts to 7% of the total benefits that goes directly to the intended ‘beneficiary’. The real cost is often higher because things happen, bureaucracy is inefficient, blah blah. I’d say the real labour cost to gatekeeping is around 10%. (Ok, I haven’t include the incredibly expensive costs to have Adobe Acrobat Pro installed, because we need to combine PDF files easily and encrypt them and blah blah. And other sort of these administrative costs lah).

Do you think it’s worth it?

And before you think – hey, it’s not that bad, this is just one programme – many low-income household apply for many different schemes, programmes, benefits etc. So it adds up to quite a significant amount of resources spent on gatekeeping. If you have some experience in the social sector, I invite you to tell me that’s not true. This is an inevitable, perhaps intended (?), consequence of ‘many helping hands’ approach. Well, I’ve said many things about ‘many helping hands’ approach, but one thing I’ll say again is that while most will agree that there is value in multiple stakeholders coming in to provide different services, harness a diversity of talents and skills to support people etc.; there is to me absolutely very little logic in ‘many helping hands’ to deliver material resources (for instance, go to SSO to apply for this, go to MUIS/CDAC to apply for that, go to hospital to apply MediFund, go to AIC to apply for this long-term care scheme, go to IMDA to apply for that digital inclusion scheme, go to MOE to apply for FAS, and the list goes on…)

Do you have any idea exactly how many schemes are out there, either by the Government or funded significantly by the Government, and how much time it takes to apply for them, and how much labour costs we incur to administer these schemes and ‘gatekeep’? And then we end up at: too many schemes and services! Need coordinators, need navigators, need information and referral services. And then the ‘problem’ of the system becomes the need for integrated and coordinated social service delivery. Yah, I like that also, but is that really tackling the issue at crux here? So all this is really an absolute nightmare, and in many ways invite us to question the failures and problems with charity and our existing social welfare paradigm.

And now I shall uncomfortably and very very briefly step into the political minefield called ‘do CDC mayors deserve to get paid so much’? I suspect the reason why many are questioning (note: not exactly against or completely rejecting, but simply questioning) the roles of CDC and mayors is this: we pay you so much taxpayer monies, to create more programmes and schemes, but to what end? To incur more costs to administer and gatekeep? Why can’t the money and resources go directly to the ‘needy’ and ‘low-income people’ the CDC and mayors are intended to serve? Heck, we should staff the CDCs exactly with these low-income people who are trying to find a job (and how many of these CDCs are staffed like that?) After some preliminary attempt at quantifying, through my own case study, the labour costs incurred when we have too many schemes and programmes, too much gatekeeping, I can only say that the doubts and questions about CDCs and mayors continue to intensify and deepen.

All of this should invite all social service practitioners to think about the administrative and gatekeeping costs that we incur with each programme, scheme etc. – no matter how well-intended. If we could do away with some unnecessary or excessive gatekeeping, my hope is that these resources can be better diverted to better places, like to people-in-need directly. Anyways, seriously who enjoys doing all this administrative gatekeeping work?? Don’t we have better things to do with our time???

I am very much part of the exact problem I am describing above, so it’s for me to reflect myself and imagine how we can transform our own internal practices, systems and policies. But really, this is more than that – it is matters of culture, paradigm and ideology.

Happy Sunday. It’s 12am and I really like to sleep but no, I’ve gotta head back to the paperwork mountain because the application portal died on me just now, which is how I ended up writing this post (!)I