MANAGING ITS OWN FINANCES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIX, Issue 79, 2 March 1929, Page 8

MANAGING ITS OWN FINANCES.

Like the railways, the Post and Telegraph Department is now responsible for its own finances. The policy of the Deform Government lay in the ' direction of commercialising - , the accounts of Government departments genererally. Under last year’s legislation the accounts of the P. and T. Department were separated from the Public Account controlled by the Treasury, although they were still left subject to the safeguards that have always existed in the way of control by the Audit Office. Formerly, the Post and Telegraph Department paid over to the Treasury the amounts it received and obtained from the Treasury all the amounts required to meet its expenditure. This left in the Consolidated Pund the surplus of post and telegraph revenue over expenditure, and, except for grants from the Consolidated Pund, there were no reserves available for the renewals of buildings, telegraph and telephone apparatus, etc., the P. and T. Department actually having no say in the administration of their surpluses where such existed. The new law provides that the department shall retain, each year, the amounts allocated to depreciation reserves, and it is made responsible for the investment of these amounts in the same way as reserves set apart by private trading - concerns are invested, the departmental revenue being credited with the interest accruing. As a matter of fact, therefore, provision has already been made for establishing - the “little reserve fund” Mr Donald told the Napier deputation he hoped to see in being. The. moneys which should have formed “depreciation reserves,” having formerly been paid into the Treasury, passed out of the control of the department, and Mr Coates and his colleagues, being strongly of the opinion that such reserves should not be subject to the expediency of Treasury requirements, obtained Parliamentary sanction to the changes that are enabling the department to handle its own finances and to make provision for its reserve funds. It is a sensible business arrangement, and one that has been advocated in these columns again and again, it being in our opinion a commonsense and businesslike policy to separate all trading accounts, such as railways and post and telegraph, from the Consolidated Fund.