A career driven by pride and purpose
For Revenue Department director-general Ekniti Nitithanprapas, the life of a civil servant is a continuation of a family tradition. By Wichit Chantanusornsiri and Oranan Paweewun
His parents’ example instilled a passion for civil service in Ekniti Nitithanprapas, who quickly rose through the ranks to take over the top job at the Revenue Department, the Finance Ministry’s largest tax-collecting unit, at a relatively young age.
Mr Ekniti, 47, had his sights set on working at the Finance Ministry since his school days, as he pursued a bachelor’s degree in economics at Thammasat University.
“Lucky me, I’ve known that civil service is the career that I desired since high school, as I saw what my parents did,” he says. “I wanted to get a civil service job because I wanted to serve the country, and this was instilled in me even without my parent’s teaching.”
He is the only son of Isra, a former deputy director of the Budget Bureau and Constitutional Court president, and Panit, who served as Ombudsman chairwoman and permanent secretary to the Office of the Prime Minister.
During their work life, both were reshuffled by politicians, driving home the truism that civil servants rarely stick around in a single position.
“I was young when my parents were reshuffled and it pissed me off,” Mr Ekniti says. “My father was deputy director of the Budget Bureau, and he was renowned for his honesty and integrity. He eventually did not get a promotion to the director-general position, was moved and later decided to resign. I saw their life and it made me stronger.”
Puey Ungphakorn, a former governor of the
Bank of Thailand, is another civil service role model.
“I read an article about Dr Puey, and he said civil servants and politicians must know their duty, that civil servants have a role in giving honest advice [to politicians] and to perform their duty with honesty and integrity, while politicians make decisions as to whether they will put such advice into practice,” Mr Ekniti says. “If civil servants want to make decisions, they must resign and become politicians.”
Mr Ekniti applies such axioms to his work life when he must turn policies delivered by politicians into reality.
Fresh out of graduate school, Mr Ekniti began as a securities broker to at least test the waters of a career in the private sector. He was hired by Phatra Securities and worked there for about a year before moving to the Revenue Department.
He chose to work at the Revenue Department because it was the only job at the Finance Ministry open at that time, and his duty was tax collection at the Pathum Wan branch office in Bangkok. The job allowed him to gain familiarity with the Revenue Code.
“I think it’s destiny that made me come back here,” he says.
He worked as a revenue official for almost a year before being shifted to the Fiscal Policy Office (FPO) after MR Chatumongol Sonakul, who was director-general at the Revenue Department at the time, and Somchai Ruchuphan, who was director-general at the FPO, learned that Mr Ekniti had won a government scholarship to study abroad. They felt that the scholarship winner should work at the FPO after returning to Thailand.
At the FPO, Mr Ekniti was posted at the Bureau of Financial Policy and Financial Institutions, where he learned about monetary policy and the Bank of Thailand’s tasks before leaving to continue his education.
While Mr Ekniti was studying in the US, Thailand’s financial crisis erupted and he chose global financial crises as a thesis topic. He pointed out in the text that applying lessons from Latin America to Thailand did not work.
After earning a doctorate in economics, he returned to Thailand and worked at the FPO, where he served as acting co-director of the Policy Research Institute after Veerathai Santiprabhob, now Bank of Thailand governor, and Sethaput Suthiwart-Narueput, currently a member of the Monetary Policy Committee, resigned.
Mr Ekniti’s main task was to persuade the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to prescribe the correct medicine for Thailand.
“At that time, I was quite confident that Thailand would recover,” he says. “The IMF started to use the right [economic] policy when I took over the job. We negotiated with the IMF to make its staff gain insights into Thailand’s problem. The IMF initially applied the approaches used in other countries, including tax hikes and tightened fiscal policy, to Thailand. We eventually made the IMF understand that our problem was not stemming from fiscal policy, but it was a financial crisis.”
After the crisis was over, Mr Ekniti worked briefly at the World Bank in Washington as a senior adviser with responsibility for Asia-Pacific before rejoining the FPO at a newly set-up unit, the Macroeconomic Policy Bureau.
At the bureau, he took part in developing an economic monitoring and forecasting system, making the FPO one of the country’s three forecasters that are also policymakers. The system continues to be in use to this day.
To broaden his economic skills and follow in Puey’s footsteps, Mr Ekniti requested the post of minister for economics and finance at the Office of Economic and Financial Affairs for the UK and Europe. While he was based in London, an economic crisis erupted in Europe and his regular work was making reports at night-time to update the Finance Ministry and the Foreign Affairs Ministry on the situation in the morning, Thailand time.
He was approached by Somchai Sujjapongse, who was director-general of the FPO at that time, to be his deputy after working in Britain for two years, and Mr Ekniti accepted the offer.
In 2015, he was promoted to director-general of the State Enterprise Policy Office (Sepo).
Although Sepo is the Finance Ministry’s smallest department at 200 employees, the combined investment budget of state enterprises under its supervision accounts for half of the government’s annual investment budget, and they are the third-largest income contributor to the state’s coffers.
Moreover, public-private partnership (PPP), the main instrument for the government to develop infrastructure megaprojects without adding to the fiscal burden, is a key Sepo task.
Mr Ekniti was credited with initiating the PPP fast-track scheme, which shortens the joint investment procedure period to nine months from almost two years previously; revamping the member appointment process for state enterprise boards by applying skill matrix screening; setting up state enterprises’ investment monitoring system; and adopting innovations like data analytics to boost efficiency.
Shortly before Mr Ekniti was reshuffled to head the Revenue Department in late May, Sepo planned to pool information from all specialised financial institutions and use data analytics to decipher consumer behaviour and enable better access to financial sources for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
In the initial stage, Sepo has linked information about tap water and electricity consumption to big data analytics technology to help the state-owned SME Bank better assess risks and make faster loan approval decisions.
For the PPP fast-track scheme, Mr Ekniti eliminated the time-consuming back-and-forth process whereby each related state agency must contact the others, instead requiring all relevant state agencies to meet at the same time to clear away the stumbling blocks and begin the process of drafting terms of reference for infrastructure projects.
“Sepo was a good school for me,” Mr Ekniti says, “as the duty let me deal with all ministries, state enterprises and labour unions. It made me stronger.”
Meditation every morning helps him to stay mindful in his daily activities, which are likely to multiply after he was reportedly named chairman of flag carrier Thai Airways International this week. Sports and travel to exotic destinations help him maintain his work-life balance.
“I studied at Vajiravudh College, where they teach students to play all kinds of sports,” Mr Ekniti says. “Rugby is the main sport of Vajiravudh College students, and it teaches about teamwork. It is a game in which some players must feel pain while letting others on the team score the goal.”
Given that he’s older now and doesn’t have a lot of spare time, swimming at weekends has become his chief hobby.
If civil servants want to make decisions, they must resign and become politicians.
EKNITI NITITHANPRAPAS
DIRECTOR-GENERAL, REVENUE DEPARTMENT