Streamlining Reimbursement Procedures for Small Official Expenditures: Personnel Must Not 'Pay Out of Pocket' for Official Business
Not long ago, during a routine general cleaning, Yin Mingming, a Corporal in a certain submarine crew unit of a certain Naval base, used a small vacuum cleaner to quickly clean the hard-to-reach sanitary corners of the 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 effort and paying out of your own pocket—that's no long-term solution." Upon further inquiry, Lei Jie learned that the small common-use items Yin Mingming had purchased at his own 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, the total came to several hundred yuan. Yin Mingming was candid about it: "Reimbursement is too much trouble. Since the amounts are small anyway, it's simpler 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 not uncommon: some personnel who worked overtime and missed meals found the missed-meal subsidy reimbursement process troublesome and time-consuming, and preferred to pay out of pocket; others who made emergency purchases of urgently needed common-use items gave up on reimbursement due to cumbersome procedures. "Looking at it comprehensively, the causes are mainly concentrated in a few areas: the amounts are small, so personnel feel embarrassed to claim; the process has too many steps, and they fear being a nuisance to the administrative organs; the cycle is long, and they can't be bothered to go through the procedures," the submarine crew unit's leadership said.
"What appears to be personnel voluntarily forgoing reimbursement is in fact the administrative organs' failure to provide adequate service, and it damages the rights and interests of the personnel." After learning of the situation, the base leadership decided to use Yin Mingming's submarine crew unit as a pilot, and introduced a series of measures to streamline the reimbursement procedures for small official expenditures at the grassroots level.
The base directed its administrative organs to conduct a comprehensive review of the common reimbursement categories, procedural steps, and points of attention at the grassroots level, compiling these into illustrated booklets for distribution to grassroots units to ensure personnel could understand them at a glance. The administrative organs published the contact information of personnel responsible for reimbursement work to open up channels for work coordination, and regularly consolidated grassroots requests for missed-meal subsidy reimbursements, common-use item purchases, and similar needs for unified review and centralized approval, so that grassroots units would no longer need 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 administrative organs designating a dedicated person to verify, confirm, and handle the purchase.
"Small expenditures no longer require paying out of pocket—kudos to the administrative organs 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 his own expense; from submitting the reimbursement application to the funds arriving in his account took only four days in total.
This reporter learned that the base's administrative organs also drew broader lessons from this case, collecting problems that personnel found urgent, difficult, worrying, or long-awaited, and established a "run at most once (最多跑一次)" office, achieving "one-stop" processing for matters such as credential issuance and welfare applications. "The more attentive and meticulous the administrative organs' service, the more trust the personnel will have in the administrative organs, and the stronger the motivation for training and combat readiness will be," the base leadership explained. Recently, they organized a questionnaire survey, and grassroots personnel satisfaction with administrative organ services showed a marked improvement.