My attention has been invited to a very considerable delay in acting upon correspondence addressed by this Office to the various executive departments concerning requests and inquiries from the Office of the United States High Commissioner and from representatives of foreign governments, as well as upon petitions and complaints from private persons and entities seeking Government protection and redress of grievances, and other matters of pressing public interest.

While I am the first to realize the difficulties involved, considering the limitations in personnel and in appropriations as well as the volume of public business transacted in the various departments, I am no less conscious of the imperative need of introducing radical reforms in what have been the deep-rooted defects of the bureaucratic system, by subordinating technicality to efficiency and sacrificing ™ form, whenever necessary, for the sake of quick and thorough results.

It is, therefore, directed that the various executive departments work out a system, such as the use of the telephone instead of formal call-up letters in connection with inquiries into the status of pending cases, whereby all correspondence coming from this Office, especially communications involving the foreign relations of this Government, and those relating to petitions seeking Government protection and redress of grievances, could be dispatched with promptness, compatible with accuracy and the demands of justice.

Done at the City of Manila, this twenty-eighth day of April, in the year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and thirty-nine, and of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, the fourth.


By the President:

JORGE B. VARGAS
Secretary to the President