Slayer of Bureaucrats

Italy may not be the mother of bureaucracy, but it has created one of the greatest broods of them all. From 70,000 bureaucrats in 1870, when Italy was united, to 635,000 under Mussolini, the government's rolls have swelled today to more than a million. As well as the government can determine (and it is not sure), it has 1,150,000 employees, whose paychecks account for half the national budget. This total includes schoolteachers, but not another 600,000 persons employed by provincial and local governments.

Government efficiency experts estimate that only 20% of the civil servants really try to help the hapless citizen who must do business--and battle--with the state. The rest either do little or do nothing, throughout their easy workday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. By law, nothing can tear even the indolent and the inefficient from the payrolls except criminal conviction for repeated flagrant insubordination, which must be proved in a formal trial. Ministries are loaded with "temporary workers" who stay until death. Forbidden to hire new stenographers, the Ministry of Justice put them on the rolls as "prison guards, female, temporary."

The multiplication of bureaucrats does not make it easier to get things done, but harder. To justify their jobs, bureaucrats proliferate their duties. One intrepid Italian insists that he had to fill out pounds of forms, in triplicate, for the files of nine different government offices, just to build a house. An Italian soldier, wounded in 1943 and certified in 1946 as 50% disabled, finally got on the pension rolls last month (with no retroactive pay). A businessman who filed a tax refund claim six years ago received the acknowledgment last week; he does not expect the refund for years. People who years ago ran two words together in telegrams find themselves summoned by registered mail, told to fill out forms and wait for hours to pay 3-c- for the extra word.

Pay Out. Recently police called on a Bari citizen, who had paid a fine in 1935 for skipping the Fascist pre-military course, to demand an uncollected registration fee: 55 centesimi (.088 of a cent). And not long ago at great output of bureaucratic labor, the government began paying off Sicilians for damage inflicted by troops of King Francis II during Garibaldi's campaign in 1860. Biggest payment: one-tenth of a cent.

Ghostly survivals of Mussolini's "Second Roman Empire" still exist--the Bureau for the Colonization of Ethiopia, the Imperial African Transport Commission, the Commission for Control of Albanian Banks, etc. Under a decree of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1819, deriving from a contract made in 1594, the government still ceremoniously pays Naples $21 every year for the upkeep of military orphans. It still advertises old scholarships that pay 16-c-^ a year to the winner--even though it now costs 32-c-^ to apply. In the Rome recorder's office; all documents are still laboriously transcribed by hand--five times.

Payoff. When new Treasury Minister Giuseppe Medici, 49, announced last year that the time had come to prune this octopus, Italians shrugged. But by last week the bearded Medici (who looks his name) could claim: "For the first time in Italy's modern history, the payrolls are going down instead of up." He has liquidated 50 bureaus (including one with 14,000 employees).

In one office he has replaced quill pens with IBM machines, and instead of being three years behind in its work, it is now only a month behind. He changed the rules so that fishermen can now get a license by producing only an identity card instead of a good-conduct certificate, a notarized proof of signature and a police reference showing no penal record. Between helicopter swoops on unsuspecting offices all over Italy, Medici proclaimed his goal: "Democracy will become a reality only when any citizen can write to any state functionary with the certainty of receiving a clear, quick, satisfactory reply."

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