Recently the Malaysian government discovered that the immigration checkpoint on their end of the Johor–Singapore Causeway is slow in processing travelers. The finding pointed the finger at the immigration officers, accusing them to be slow because they are often late and spend too much time on their phone.
If I am a Malaysian immigration officer, I would tell them they are in no position to make any accusation of slowness. It took them five decades to realise a fact this obvious, I would argue that this makes the Michael Bay movies worthy slow motion stamping immigration officers look like the poster child of efficiency.
Anyone who have crossed the Singapore-Johor border knows that the traffic bottleneck is always on the Malaysian side of the immigration. This has been happening since the existence of the check point, and far from a recent development
If I am a Malaysian immigration officer I would also argue the finding is illogical and factually incorrect. The slowness predates the existence of mobile phones so it is absurd to put the blame on this.
The authority’s solution for this apparently is to install cameras to monitor the immigration officers so that they don’t stamp passports like Keanu Reeves dodging slow motion bullets in the Matrix trilogy. If you ask me it is exactly this kind of thinking that made their bureaucracy so inefficient. Say they do this, who do they hire to look at those boring monitor screens of people stamping passports? A dog would be bored to sleep. What is preventing the guy who is supposed to stare at those screens Netflix binging on his/her phone?
For them to get rid of such entrenched inefficiency it’s actually quite simple. They just need to hire people who are well versed in bureaucracy and human behaviour, like me.
My solution would be both simple and effective. I would remove most if not all of the officer’s basic salary and pay them by the number of passport cleared, say 50 Malaysian sen per passport. You can be sure they will stamp those passports like there is no tomorrow.
If you are a thinking guy you might fear this would jeopardize border security. My solution is equally simple, they would get paid even more when they flag a problematic entry. Say 1 Malaysian ringgit for flagging an invalid travel documents. 5 ringgit for flagging a criminal, 50 ringgit for terrorist. And to make sure they don’t abuse the incentives, a negative 50 ringgit for making a wrong call.
Of course the numbers need to be fine tuned to the Malaysian economy, but you get the idea.
This would be enough to make the immigration clearance super efficient, but my flair for organisational excellence does not end here. At the end of every shift there would be a guy/gal who gets the most earning, let’s call him/her the top scorer. The top scorer would get a special benefit on the next shift, to man an “express counter”. The express counter is for those who are in a hurry. To go through it, the traveler would have to pay 10 ringgit. 5 ringgit would go to the immigration officer and the rest goes to the department. A win-win-win for the immigration officer, the immigration department, and the traveler.
Jabatan Imigresen Malaysia, sama sama (you are welcome).