H.—l4.

14

provision for superannuation, the salaries allotted will, no doubt, be considered reasonable. The scale for the General Division has been a difficult one to frame owing to the great diversity of practice in Departments, which has created anomalies which cannot be entirely removed at once. These should, however, rapidly adjust themselves. There are some Departments, or branches of Departments —namely, Mental Hospitals, Prisons, Government Printing Office, Special Schools, Lighthouses—the majority of the staff of which have been working under Departmental classification scales. After careful comparison of the Mental Hospital scale with that existing for similar employees in Australia, it was found to compare favourably, and has, with slight modifications, been adopted. The Prisons scale is generally regarded by employees in other Government Departments as a liberal one, and it does not appear to require any alteration. The Government Printing Office scale was revised as lately as December last, but has been amended in certain points. The Special Schools scale has been accepted for the time being, so far as teachers are concerned, but this is on the understanding that if any improvement is made in the national scale the teachers of the special schools will participate. The Lighthouse scale was adopted without alteration. The classification of the Department of Agriculture is subject to alteration in the event of any departmental reorganization which may take place. Attendance-books. While all Departments are not alike, it has been too evident that in some of them there has been a very vague perception of the fact that one of the most important duties of officers is to be regular and punctual in their attendance. Although the regulations of 1873 were precise enough in directing the keeping of attendance-books and the supervision of the attendance of officers, it was found that they had become in many cases more or less a dead-letter. In one large Department no attendance-books were in existence and in others no attempt was made to see that they were properly kept, with the result that the proportion of late attendance was altogether too great. It is easy to calculate that if twenty officers are ten minutes late in the morning and ten minutes late after the luncheon interval, and that there are as many minutes lost in corridor conferences at other times in the day, the staff is 5 per cent, greater than it need be if officers are punctual in their attendance. It has been reported that there has been a considerable increase in efficiency in this respect in those Departments in which exception had to be taken to the prevailing methods. As the Public Service officers of New Zealand have an extremely liberal holiday scale, it is imperative that they should perform their full duty when they are required to attend at their offices. Overtime. While there has been a good deal of overtime worked in some Departments, it is by no means clear that much of it could not have been easily avoided by foresight on the part of controlling officers. No doubt it is necessary in some Departments to perform work beyond ordinary office hours at the time of the annual balance, but even in the commercial Departments a good deal of this could be obviated by adopting methods of bringing forward the work during the year. Similarly, in non-commercial Departments it should be found possible to bring returns forward during the year, so that there need be no unnecessary pressure at the end of the financial year. After carefully considering the matter, when drafting the regulations, it was decided that it would be undesirable to make any special regulations for the payment of overtime to the clerical or professional divisions, as experience has proved that specified conditions under which overtime may be earned do not conduce to the diminution of expenditure on this account. Among the many controlling officers who have assisted the Commissioners, one has expressed himself very freely in this matter, while another took the matter up in such a practical way that he was able to prove to his officers that work which had been for years performed on overtime payment could be done in the usual office hours by proper arrangement. The Commissioners are of opinion that it is only in rare instances of unexpected