IT MIGHT ALMOST be called a new gold rush. Although few outside the civil service have yet realised it, many top bureaucrats see a pot of gold at the end of Tung Chee-hwa's plans to introduce an accountability system for his team of principal officials.
Their logic is simple enough. The current review - which is expected to produce some proposals for Mr Tung to announce in his October policy address - will inevitably result in a move towards some form of a quasi-ministerial system that will also, over the long term, make it easier to bring in high-flyers from the private sector.
After all, the driving force behind the change - which was first signalled in the 2000 Policy Address - is public dissatisfaction at the lack of any way to hold top officials accountable for their failures, as was so evident during last year's scandal over the use of short piles in several public-housing projects.
Change is only possible by loosening the iron rice bowl of the nearly absolute job security that top government officials currently enjoy and making it possible for them to be fired in much the same way as their private-sector counterparts.
But if, in future, they are to be subject to the same uncertainties as top executives in the private sector, then surely, the bureaucrats argue, they should also be entitled to receive similar salaries to compensate for such risks?
For all the talk of overpaid officials, it is difficult to deny that top government civil servants earn far less than those in comparable positions in private companies. There are good reasons for this, not least that many pampered bureaucrats would not last five minutes in the harsh world of the private sector.
Nonetheless, the discrepancy is large enough to have lured several senior officials away to higher-paying jobs in recent years. And it was highlighted when Antony Leung Kam-chung gave up a $10 million a year job with investment bank J P Morgan Chase for a comparatively modest $2.5 million salary, after he takes over as Financial Secretary on May 1.