The introduction of a maternity leave fund in July 2015 was a good policy aimed at ending gender discrimination in the workforce. Employers pay 0.3 per cent of the basic pay for every employee to build up a fund from which the 14-week maternity leave will be paid.

Making it easier for female workers to find the right balance between family and work commitments is a good strategy. Spreading the cost of family-friendly measures is the right tactic. However, getting tangled in a bureaucratic maze that penalises employers is bad execution that threatens to eliminate the benefits of good policy.

The Malta Employers’ Association has complained that, so far, employers have had to pay twice for the maternity leave granted to employees by contributing 0.3 per cent to the maternity leave fund and still giving entitled staff the statutory maternity pay. The MEA’s director general, Joseph Farrugia, is right in not tolerating delays in payments from the fund.

The maternity fund board says it wants to ensure “full transparency” and that “this had led to no refunds being issued yet, despite employers paying their contributions for 10 months”. The need for full transparency is mandatory for any publicly-administered funds but this does not mean retaining a process that was flawed because it did not refund employers in a reasonable time. Waiting for 10 months to be reimbursed is certainly not a reasonable time.

This government has often promised to cut down on red tape and excessive bureaucracy. Various attempts were made and high profile officials were appointed to ensure that this pious intention would produce real benefits to ordinary people who make use of public services. Yet, there is still hard evidence that the battle against bureaucracy is not being won. To dress up this failure as a consequence of proper governance in the management of public finances is a deception because good governance does not depend on excessive shoving of paper.

The policy of assisting female workers to cope with family pressures when a new child is born is a good move because the country’s economic growth depends on a series of such measures that motivate women to return or remain in the workplace even when raising a young family. It would indeed be a great shame if this good policy where to be made ineffective by penalising employers who agree to participate in schemes aimed to spread the cost of such family-friendly measures.

If the government finds it difficult to define and implement effective processes that support the function of the maternity leave fund, it could seriously consider farming out this service to a private accountancy firm that is prepared to bind itself with a service level agreement in return for an administrative fee. The process can easily be digitalised with information flowing from employers to the fund administrators in real time and with reimbursement to employers taking no longer than a few days.

The failure of this relatively new process to deliver the desired results cannot be mitigated with ‘civil service speak’ that one is used to hearing in comedies like Yes Minister. The worrying reality may be that this policy was introduced without first thinking through the process by which the maternity leave benefits would flow efficiently to the beneficiaries without penalising employers.

The Ministry of Finance should immediately call in representatives of employers to discuss why the payment process is so flawed and to define a new way of making it efficient and effective.

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