Question

1. The Department of Revenue wants to add more people to the unit that attempts to collect unpaid taxes through telephone contact. As a budget analyst, what questions would you ask after you receive and review the following request? Be specific, look at the data carefully.

Date: June 19, 2012

Subject: Collection Telephone Pursuit

Currently there are 19 employees working on telephone pursuits on a full-time basis. Each employee can make an average of 25 to 40 phone calls per day. The amount collected by the 19 employees for the past year is $17,858,623. If we could add an automated phone system and increase our staff by 10 full-time employees, we could double the number of phone calls made and increase our collections by 59 percent, or $8,900,000.

2. City Library Performance Measures (2007-2010)

Performance Measures	2007	2008	2009	2010
Materials in collection	43,937	46,464	46,000	55,000
Borrowers registered	35,544	38,089	41,093	43,247
Hours open per week	56	56	56	50
Book budget per capita	$1.05	$1.10	$1.15	$1.40
Library materials circulated	187,481	188,203	188,050	167,365
Patron visits	111,550	110,939	121,167	103,491
Annual customer satisfaction survey- # of respondents	1,500	1,348	1,256	1,243

Please refer to the above table and answer the following questions:

2 (a): What does the table tell us about performance of the city’s library?

2 (b): In your opinion, what kind of performance information is useful in this table?

2 (c): How could these performance measures be used in budget decisions?

Answer 1

Answer 1:

It is not true that increasing the staff will double the phone calls and also increase the revenue by the same amount. Here the concept of economics plays an important role. It states that every employee employed for the work may not be as efficient as the earlier employee. This might lead to fall in the number of phone calls and thus revenue generated. Also, increasing the employees might lead to diminishing returns as more people employed for the work than required which might lead to fall in total product.