Revised Budget 2013 Receive Board's Approval

Dear Colleagues

 

After almost 3 months of hard work by the Financial Health and Budget Review Task Force (FRTF), finally the revised 2013 budget has received approval from the Board of Trustees on 20 June 2013.

By the instruction of the Ex-Com, the Task Force has to make three rounds of budget cut to meet the prescribed target, i.e., the total expenditure budget combining all accounts in Funds 10, 21 and 24 must be less than the corresponding actual expense (671.21 million Baht) of the previous year 2012. The Task Force reached the target by exploiting the following cost savings:

 

(1) Infrastructure and IT services (saving = -30.82 million Baht)

(2) Administrative Units (saving = 26.65 million Baht)

(3) Discontinuation of Outreach Centers (saving = -11.41 million Baht)

(4) Roll-back of Salary Increments (saving = -5.45 million Baht)

Total saving = -74.33 million Baht

 

On the other hand, the Task Force has recommended additional budget for the following two items:

(1) Online Database of the Library (+8.46 million Baht)

(2) Electricity Budget due to the Rate Increase (+11.70 million Baht)

Total increase = +20.16 million Baht

Thus, the net saving = -54.17 million Baht

Finally, the total expenditure budget of 2013 is reduced from 724.90 down to 670.73 million Baht, slightly less than the actual expenditure of 671.21 million Baht in 2012.

On the roll-back of salary increments, the Board of Trustees have approved the following guidelines, which will be implemented immediately by HRO:

ROLL-BACK OF SALARY INCREMENT GUIDELINES AS APPROVED BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES ON 20 JUNE 2013
(All provisions below only apply to employees with salary above 30,000 B per month)
Guidelines	Description	Action	No. of Cases
Provision 1	Faculty Reclassification	Defer reclassification effectively June 1, 2013, until AIT regains financial health	44
Provision 2	2012 and 2013 Salary Increase in Violation of P & P on Employment of Staff: General Work Regulations (PA-1-3-3-IV.c.1.g)	Retraction of Increment retroactively and salaries restored to the level prior to date of violation	34
Provision 3	Employees receiving 2013 approved salary merit increase, despite poor 2012 financial performance of AIT.	Increment to be retracted to 0% retroactively and salaries restored to date before increase.	38
Provision 4	Salary increment due to rank promotion or position change.	No retraction to be made	14
Special Case	Correction of Professorial Promotion date, based on the official approval by the Board of Trustees	Re-compute salary based on the new date of BOT approval	2
		Total Cases Affected	118

 

  

Notes:

 

(1) Although there was a suggestion to implement an involuntary 10% cut in the basic salaries across the board, it is not adopted.

(2) Certain number of raises during 2012 and 2013 were not in compliance with the AIT's P&P. They will be nullified. This affects 34 cases of staff who were given salary increases 2 years in a row. The PA-1-3-3-IV.c.1.g states that staff salary increase cannot be given within a span of less than 2 calendar years.

(3) We need the understanding of all faculty colleagues as the faculty reclassification that was implemented earlier in 2013 has to be suspended until AIT recovers from this financial crisis.

(4) Since AIT performed rather dismally in 2012 (making a deficit of 201 million Baht), it is rather unreasonable for any employee to be awarded a salary increase in 2013. Thus, all salary increments in 2013 will be rolled back to 0%.

(5) The Task Force agreed not to apply the cut to any employee under 30K monthly salary.

At the end, we must realize that budget cut alone will not save AIT. AIT needs the cooperation of all employees to generate more incomes. I have one good news to report. Thanks to the presence of the former Deputy Prime Minister, Dr Sahas Bunditkul, in our visit to the Office of Higher Education Commission (OHEC), AIT has been offered an additional budget of 25 million Baht as a token of appreciation from OHEC on top of our frozen budget of 47 million Baht. So for this August intake, we have 72 million Baht.

With this email, aside from the White Paper on AIT Financial Health distributed earlier, I am pleased to attach 2 files, a Report on Revised Budget 2013 and my powerpoint presentation to the Board of Trustees on 20 June 2012.

With kind regards,

Worsak