Streamlining Reimbursement Procedures for Small Official Expenditures — Service Members Must Not Pay Out of Pocket for Official Business

A Navy Base Headquarters Streamlines Reimbursement Procedures for Small Official Expenditures —

Service Members Must Not Pay Out of Pocket for Official Business

■ Qiang Yugong, Yang Chen

Not long ago, during a routine general cleaning, Yin Mingming, a Corporal in a submarine crew unit under a certain Navy base, used a small vacuum cleaner to quickly clear the hard-to-reach corners of a compartment. His squad leader, Senior Master Sergeant Lei Jie, saw this and asked in surprise: "That vacuum cleaner works really well — when did you requisition it?" Yin Mingming scratched his head and replied: "I bought it with my own money."

"Putting in the work and paying out of your own pocket — that's no long-term solution." Lei Jie looked into the matter and learned that the small common-use items Yin Mingming had purchased at personal expense were not limited to this one: cleaning paste for equipment interiors, magnetic hooks for bulkheads, label stickers for marking pipelines… Although each item cost little on its own, the total came to several hundred yuan. Yin Mingming was candid about it: "Reimbursement is too much trouble. The amounts are small anyway, so it's easier to just pay out of pocket."

That same day, Lei Jie reported the situation to the submarine crew unit's leadership. Upon investigation, they found that such cases were far from rare: some service members who worked overtime and missed meals found the missed-meal allowance reimbursement process cumbersome and time-consuming, and preferred to pay out of pocket; others who made urgent purchases of needed common-use items gave up on reimbursement because the procedures were too complicated. "Looking at it overall, the reasons mainly come down to a few factors: the amounts are small, so people feel embarrassed to claim; the process has too many steps, and people don't want to trouble the headquarters; the cycle is long, and people can't be bothered to go through the procedures," the unit's leadership said.

"What appears to be service members voluntarily forgoing reimbursement is in fact a failure of headquarters services, and it damages the rights and interests of service members." After learning of the situation, the base leadership decided to use Yin Mingming's submarine crew unit as a pilot and introduce a series of measures to streamline reimbursement procedures for small official expenditures at the grassroots level.

The base directed its headquarters to conduct a comprehensive review of common reimbursement categories, procedural steps, and points of attention at the grassroots level, compiling this information into illustrated booklets for distribution to grassroots units to ensure service members could understand them at a glance. The headquarters published contact information for personnel responsible for reimbursement work to open up channels for coordination, and regularly consolidated grassroots requests for missed-meal allowance reimbursements, common-use item purchases, and similar needs for unified review and centralized approval — so that grassroots units no longer had to "run to multiple offices" or "make repeated trips." In addition, the base explicitly required that for urgently needed common-use items, submarine crew units could apply for expedited procurement at any time, with the headquarters assigning a dedicated person to verify, confirm, and handle the purchase.

"Small expenditures no longer require paying out of pocket — we applaud the headquarters for this practical measure!" Yin Mingming said happily. After the series of measures to streamline reimbursement were rolled out across the submarine crew units, he submitted receipts for the common-use items he had purchased at personal expense. From submitting the reimbursement application to receiving the funds, the entire process took only four days.

This reporter learned that the base headquarters also drew broader lessons from this experience, collecting problems that service members found urgent, difficult, worrying, or frustrating, and establishing a "maximum one visit" (最多跑一次) office to provide one-stop processing for matters such as credential issuance and welfare applications. "The more attentive and thorough headquarters services are, the more trust service members will have in the headquarters, and the stronger their motivation for training and preparing for war will be," the base leadership explained. Recently, they organized a questionnaire survey, and grassroots service members' satisfaction with headquarters services showed a marked improvement.